Coding on the iPad

There are just some thing you can’t do on an iPad, no matter how much you love it, and yes, doubters, I do love mine. I have just learned what it can and cannot do this week, as I take a road trip that is composed of several tech conferences with no laptop.

With a sigh of relief I sit down at my Half Moon Bay computer to write this post. Not very sexy, this computer: it’s a first generation Mac Mini with a discarded TV set as a monitor, a random Dell keyboard and my son-in-law’s discarded mouse. But I know I am going to be able to bang out this post in ten minutes.

On Tuesday I went to AlwaysOn Demand and tried to blog Mark Benioff’s keynote. I was sitting at a table for bloggers, and when I laid the iPad down, the reflection of the screen at the front of the room glared into my display. When I began to type, I couldn’t work fast enough to catch what he was saying. I ended up capturing most of it in Evernote, and then tried to cut and paste it into WordPress.

Cutting and pasting a long document is laborious indeed. Yes, I finally got it done. It was two hours after the presentation had ended — an eternity for me in terms of live blogging from conferences.

Wednesday I sat in a Starbucks trying desperately to turn an email into a Word document, and finally had to download Pages because Google Docs for iPad doesn’t seem to let you upload or orginate documents, just view them.

Truly a content creator’s nightmare. But it gets worse.

I also read about the Facebook conference, and wanted to add the new social features to my blog. (Yes, I’m a groupie). I found out how to do it, and in Peet’s this morning I got into a discussion with Ian McGee about it.

He was anxious to try as well, and he had the URL to the developer pages. I copied the frame code, which was not easy, because inside the layout on the FB page, the select all/copy/select feature in the iPad didn’t work well. I finally was able to select it all. Then I had to get to my blog and make a new text widget. I know how to do that, and it should take a minute, but I couldn’t drag the text widget feature to my sidebar.

After playing around for a while, I turned on the accessibility feature for WordPress, and it gave me an edit menu that let me create the widget. I pasted in the frame code and tried it. Whoops! I didn’t realize you had to replace the example with your own URL. Back in we went. This time Ian tried to get the code to find the permalink to the post on the first page. When we tried that, we got an error message. Then we tried to go back to just putting my blog’s URL in the widget, and we got another FB error message saying we needed a URL.

After an hour and a half of playing with the iPad, WordPress and Facebook, we exceeded the time we had available to meet (on an entirely other subject) and parted company. Me, I was so frustrated that I got on the Reformer in the Pilates Studio to calm down by working out. I don’t know where Ian went:-)

Then I got home, got on my jerry-rigged desktop system, and put the like button on the site in two minutes.

And don’t tell me to get a keyboard and a mouse for the iPad. If I wanted to do that, I could just have brought my MacBook Air with me. LOL

Tagged as: iPad, Mac Mini, MacBook Air, Wordpress