You know they blew it.

Did you know that Garry Trudeau is to blame for the lousy implementation of handwriting to text on the ipad?

When apple brought out the newton, which was the blackberry killer, doonesbury mercilessly lampooned the handwriting to text errors of the newton.  Nonsensical things.

Palm Pilot competitor. ..

Steve Jobs hated the newton.  He called it the scribble pad.  As soon has he retook control of apple, he killed the newton.

I think he developed an aversion to handwriting to text.

When they released the first ipad, there was no mention of it.  a lone developer released a separate app for it, but they were not promoted by  apple.

When apple released the first ipad, I bought one.  I wanted a tablet that I could write on with a stylus and  have display text.  There had to be a way.  Yes, by going to great lengths you could do it, but it was not part of the operating system.  It was an extra application.  I didn’t buy another ipad for a long time.

It was after Tim Cook made the pencil work with the low end ipad, I  bought again.  Handwriting to text was mentioned parenthetically.  It was a little easier.

And this is why the ipad is a failure.  The most natural way to write is to sit with a pen in one hand and a paper in the other.  This is really the only reason for an ipad to exist.

Steve said, so I’ve heard, that when you see a new company bring out their handheld device, ‘if you see a stylus, you know they blew it.’

Once again, the very idea of writing is scorned.

Instead, they have turned the ipad into an always trailing camp follower to the mac.  The operating system is clumsy, but it will nearly do what a mac can do.  It’s sort of a lightweight production machine.  Wow!  

I say, if you see a keyboard, you know they blew it.

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robincravey

Robin Cravey is a Texas poet, publisher, citizen, and lawyer. As editor and publisher if Tilted Planet Press, he has published several books of poems, including Diverging, I am a Comet, and Benchmarks. His book Watermarks has been serialized on the Austin Sierran website. A sixth-generation Texan, Robin grew up in Houston, loving tall trees, big clouds, girls, Omar Khayyam, Carl Sandberg, and Walt Whitman. He came to Austin to attend UT, loving clear water, peyote, taxicabs, women, newspapers, hitchhiking, Marcus Aurelius, and William O. Douglas. He married and had kids, loving Dr. Suess, Star Trek, Baghavad Gita, Mohandas Gandhi, and Macintosh. Eventually he volunteered way too much, published books, ran a business, fought city hall, went to law school, worked at city hall, ran a small law office, ran for public office. In recent years he has divided his time between Austin and Providence, Rhode Island, loving Wayland Square, bicycling, and long train rides.

One thought on “You know they blew it.”

  1. Could it be that device creators are in cahoots to destroy handwriting so that we are totally dependent on devices in order to type our communications? Think about schools eliminating cursive — the least cumbersome form of handwriting — from their curriculum. I think it’s been restored in some schools, but I’m not sure. I hate thinking that schools are succumbing to the tech world and giving up on humanity’s greatest invention — after fire, I suppose.

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