Mobile website maintenance

Webpage building mobile apps are still in their infancy, with really no great ones yet, that is, none that let you visually construct a page. Even the best simply FTP simple html back and forth. However, it is surprising, appalling actually how poorly they do even that mundane chore. FTP Clent Pro is the exception. It is so easy to use, fast (much faster even than my desktop program, WSFTP), and just realy makes sense in its user interface. Can't say enough good things about it. Best of all, it is enabling me to devote the time my languishing webspace has needed for all too long.

Experiences with some new apps

This past couple weeks I tried out some new apps. Two held really great promise, Infinidocs and SwipeSelection. Let's take the last one first. Typing on the iPad is an acquired taste, as they say. To call it difficult is about as big an understatement as a person can make. SwipeSelection promised easy cursor movement, something that is really really cumbersome on the iPad but an integral part of writing. Big fail! In email, typing excruciatingly slowly, it does as advertised. But at every other time, forget it! Too bad. Infinidocs came through however. What does it do? Look at the picture. IPad owners will recognize that the native iPad dock will hold only seven apps. How many do I have? Cool, huh?! :-)

iOS6 is here

Okay, so it is. With a jailbroken iPad2, however, it means I am in no hurry to update, in spite of Apple's insistent and constant needling that I do so. There won't be a jailbreak routine for iOS6 for some while. It took almost a year for the one for iOS5 to appear. So we'll see. Ironically, one of iOS6 new capabilities is one of the things jailbreaking got me, the ability to add attachments to email. But it wasn't the only one, or even the most important.
That honor goes to the ability to use a flash drive, something Apple is unlikely to sanction for the foreseeable future, given their almost cultic belief in "the cloud.".

New favorite app!

I really like jazz piano, so this one is being used a lot! Can't get enough of it. :-). Can multitask while listening too!

More iPad peeves...

Yeah, there are one or two more gripes. A big one is the iPad keyboard. It really goes back to iOS, which is after all designed for phones. Thus the less than completely useful keyboard, that one net reviewer called "a frustration for touch typists.". Indeed it is. The details. The keyboard has three layers, with the numbers on layer two and symbols such as the equal sign and slash and brackets on layer three. So to insert a number sign takes three taps forward and two taps back again. Apostrophes. Require a sliding-and-hold motion on the exclamation key, which I often get wrong because you have to hold it for a two full seconds for it to appear. Same with capital letters. And don't forget that punctuation characters are in all the wrong places, different from any other keyboard in fact, leading to some disorientation when going from iPad to desktop computer and vice versa.

Another benefit of having a jailbroken iPad

Note the this iPad email through the Mail client is sending an attachment, something a non-jailbroken iPad cannot do. Cool, huh?

At last! Found a way around the dreaded tabletized webpage!

In a previous post I bemoaned the unfortunate forcing of "mobile" versions of websites on tablet users. I even downloaded a patch that was supposed to tweak the iOS and fool the server into thinking the iPad was a desktop. Didn't work very often. Now however I have a new browser, DiigoBrowser, and hooray! The USPS site is once again normal! Scroll down two posts back and you'll see what I see when I use any other browser.