Category: Content

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.

Got Content? You can manage it.

You know what you’re looking for.  Do you know how to find it?  You need a CMS (Content Management System).  You want something that you can put things in and then easily find them later.  Got it.  It’s called: “the Finder.”

It was invented by a little startup that stole it from an experimental lab run by a big legacy company.  But, it’s not hard to find.  It comes preinstalled on every Mac (Apple computer).

You probably don’t think about the Finder much.  That’s the kind of CMS you want.  Because what you’re interested in is your Content, not the Management System.

The reason you don’t have to think about the Finder is because it’s intuitive.  That means it works like you would expect.  It’s a hierarchical file system. (no sorry, Apple, you can’t own that).  It’s really simple.  Things that go together, you put in a folder.  And folders that go together, you put in a higher level folder.  It’s called sorting.

Intuitive means you understand it without thinking about it.  Why do we understand the Finder so well?  Because it is based on a system that was developed over centuries, using paper.

It works with anything.  It’s application-independent.  You can put a movie and a spreadsheet and a text document in the same folder.

There are a lot of content management systems, but very few that manage content as well as the Finder.  It’s the standard.  Soon, I’ll compare another CMS with the Finder.