Since I bought my first iPad I’ve tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sim­ple writ­ing apps,but none of them have lasted as they were all too lim­ited in what you could do with what you’d written.I finally came across an app called Drafts, which lets you export what you’ve writ­ten to any­thing. There are even dozens of export options for apps I don’t even have (turned off by default to avoid clut­ter). Now I can write a blog post using Mark­down, send it as HTML to the clipboard,and paste it into the Word­Press app, which is how I wrote this post.

I’ve been read­ing many good things about an iPad app called Paper, so I decided to give it a try using my iPad 3 and a pres­sure sen­si­tive sty­lus. It’s a very well thought out draw­ing app, and while I’m totally lack­ing in artis­tic abil­ity I do some­times need to make dia­grams and other sim­ple draw­ings for work. Paper comes with a “foun­tain pen” tool, which emu­lates the flex­i­ble nibs that foun­tain pens used to have before the wide­spread use of copy paper. I found it to be very dif­fi­cult to use:

Paper’s foun­tain pen tool

I don’t have a real foun­tain pen with a flex­i­ble nib for com­par­i­son, so I used one with an italic nib instead:

Actual foun­tain pen

I decided to test the Dic­ta­tion fea­ture on my new iPad to see if it actu­ally worked. Here is my sam­ple text:

I say to the gods and the sons of gods the things that whet my thoughts; by the wells of the world there is none with the might to make me do his will.

Dic­ta­tion ren­dered that as:

Mes­sage the gods and the sons of guns the love my thoughts for the Wilson’s the world there is none within the com­mit­ment do his will

It’s a good thing I’ve got­ten bet­ter at touch-typing with an iPad.

The news isn’t there to tell you what hap­pened. It’s there to tell you what it wants you to hear, or what it thinks you want to hear. They already have their sto­ries worked out. They just wait for events to fill in the blanks. When they don’t fit, they get side­lined or twisted till they do.

Aston­ish­ing X-Men #7

I came across this while play­ing with the (fre­quently plugged) Mar­vel Comics reader app for my new iPad. It’s rather nice to see pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists rec­og­nized for what they really are in pop­u­lar cul­ture. At first I was a bit sur­prised, but then I remem­bered that this series is writ­ten by Joss Whe­don, cre­ator of Fire­fly.

I found some inter­est­ing iPad reviews from Ars Tech­nica, Mac­In­Touch, Adam Tow, and John Gru­ber.

iPad Appli­ca­tion Design. The iPad may be a larger ver­sion of the iPhone in terms of the hard­ware and oper­at­ing sys­tem, but treat­ing it as the same device would be fool­ish. It turns out that increas­ing the dis­play size of touch-screen hard­ware can trans­form it into an entirely new class of device. [Matt Leg­end Gem­mell]

It’s true that the iPad is basi­cally a larger iPod Touch, but the dif­fer­ence that extra size makes is actu­ally pretty sig­nif­i­cant. The author looks at some of the ways that being big­ger matters.