Writing on the iPad

A few observations after writing every night on the iPad for the last week or so:

• The lack of multi-tasking is a blessing (even if it’s also a bit of a pain). I find that I pick a task, finish it, and move on to the next thing. Tonight I wrote two emails, then I switched to Agricola to play my turns in two online games, then I ducked into Byword to write this post. But I did all of those as discrete actions in a sequence, instead of trying to stack them all together into one mental thread.
• The pain I mentioned above only seems to come into play when I need to pop out of one app to grab something (usually a URL) from another. I think I’ll have to investigate whether there’s an iOS clipboard app or workflow utility that will allow me to hold some of that stuff in a bucket that’s available system-wide. I’ve grown spoiled by the clipboard history in Launchbar on OS X.
• It’s been a long time since I’ve managed to string together this many days of writing. I write mostly in Day One, but I’ve also been posting more to this blog.
• I was excited to find that Byword could publish directly to a self-hosted WordPress blog, then disappointed to find that it sent the post as the rendered HTML, not Markdown. I like having my post data in Markdown, even when in WordPress. I guess that means I’ll be copying and pasting from Byword into the WordPress app. Unfortunately, it appears that simple things like this Markdown list are rendered as separate paragraphs when copying and pasting into the WordPress iOS app. I had to fix this post on my laptop.
• My iPad 2 really struggles with iOS 8. Sometimes I type and it takes a while for the characters to appear, causing lots of errors as I delete and re-type. I’m also running out of space (I really hope Apple starts admitting that 16GB doesn’t leave much room for—well, anything, really—and that they start selling devices with 64GB as the base model).