The Journey Home

Authors note: This post was actually written on Sunday. As it turns out, writing it on the iPad was no problem at all, but actually posting it (with the picture and links) was a different matter entirely.

You know, the train journey from Edinburgh to Doncaster is really quite beautiful, for the most part. A reasonable amount of it happens within sight of the sea and most of the rest passes through open country. The Yorkshire dales is a landscape I find quite pleasing to look out over, unless I'm driving through it, in which case I find to to mostly feel endless. Some of the towns you pass through have more charm than others, of course. Newcastle isn't without its fans, and Berwick-Upon-Tweed is gorgeous, but I can't see anyone wanting to put Doncaster on a postcard any time soon.

Why the sudden reflection? I'm on the way down to visit my parents for a couple of days and for the first time in years I'm not taking a "real" computer with me. The implication here, of course, is that I'm taking something which is not a real computer, or at least something which some don't consider to be one. I picked up an iPad on my recent work trip down under (AU$ was doing quite well against USA$ at the time, which knocked a considerable amount of the price as far as I was concerned) and that's a gadget I have with me. Yes, I'm typing this on an iPad. I actually typed the majority of this post on it as well, using the on-screen keyboard, and it wasn't too bad at all. The biggest problem was that it reduced to effective screen area so much. Right now, though, I'm using a bluetooth keyboard for the typing. The iPad itself is resting on the crappy little shelf  attached to the seat in front (angled using one of these cases, which I highly recommend), while the keyboard is sitting on my knee, actually under the shelf. All in all, this setup is one hell of a lot more comfortable than a laptop would be in these circumstances. So that's definitely a win.

I didn't buy this thing to replace a laptop exactly, though. That would be silly. Nor did I intend to replace a smart phone with it. That makes no sense. What, then, is it actually for? This seems to be the number two reaction to seeing the thing in my experience. Number one being "cool!" and "it looks just like a giant iPhone!" being quite high up the list, as well. No, what I intended to replace with this gizmo is one of these:

As a general rule, I need to write thinks down more. I should probably make more notes of ideas and such which occur to me when I'm not in a position to do anything about them, and I find that todo lists are basically a necessity when it comes to keeping myself organised. Paper is pretty good for this, as a general rule. I'm pretty fond of my squared paper moleskin journal and when it comes to just scribbling things down I'd say it's pretty much unsurpassable. But, and there's usually a but, carrying it around at all times isn't exactly practical and it doesn't have an erase (or move) function, which isn't ideal when you suddenly realise that the diagram you've been working on for the last half an hour really needs to be about an inch to the left if you're actually going to fit the whole thing on the page.

If you're using Evernote for your notes, though, then jotting things down with a phone (which I do carry at all times) becomes an option. Throw in a couple of other applications and scribbling, brainstorming and generally playing with ideas does become a legitimate possibility. A possibility contained in something no larger than a Moleskin, which does have an erase, and indeed a shift-a-bit-to-the-left, function. Todo lists are a different matter, though, and I'm going to come back to those later.

As a final note here, it should probably be quite obvious that I'm not going to be doing any clockwork aphid related work in the next couple of days, as hacking is not currently a legitimate possibility on the iPad. Someone really needs to write an app which interfaces with Eclipse (or any other IDE) on your desktop and turns it into a context sensitive programmer's assistant keyboard type thing, though. Expect good things to show up towards the end of the week, however.