Text-based workflow

Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 8, 2013 at 05:20 PM

That, alas, is how Apple makes all that lovely money - the mayfly-like lifespan of their products nowadays! Actually, that’s not fair to their notebooks and desktops, but iPads are notoriously short-lived - a whole bunch of features in iOS 7 will be unavailable to those with iPad 2s, like me. And as my daughter - and now you - have found, iOS 6 is entirely unavailable on iPad 1s. Having said that, I do a lot of serious work on my iPad. This usually involves compromises - I am, for example, currently sitting in Starbucks typing a translation in GetInfo, which allows me to load a PDF file into one window and type text into another, smaller window - but it’s not exactly state-of-the-art, especially compared to a netbook. On the other hand, I have complete Internet access, I am able to consult various online reference sources, at any time I can copy and paste my text draft into a more serious application and synchronise the resulting Word document with my office systems (which run on Soonr.com, a business-oriented version of Dropbox and also available as an iOS app). So from a slightly different perspective, I have as much as I need. And before you ask - no, I don’t have and wouldn’t buy a 3G-enabled iPad. I use a MiFi instead, which supports multiple computers/devices simultaneously and also plays nicely with my micro-NAS, a 32GB SanDisk Connect WiFi Flash Drive, which in turn plays nicely with my colleagues’ - andy my various other - iPads and mobile devices. Rather than using an Apple keyboard (large, clunky, not very portable), I use one of Logitech’s little numbers, which also acts as a case for the iPad.

I’m not actually wittering on about these things in order to impress you with my mobile lifestyle (forced upon me by the fact that my children need constant ferrying to and from the many classes, competitions, events, get-togethers etc. that young people get dragged into); it’s simply to demonstrate that a whole new working model is rapidly becoming feasible that has nothing to do with specific software and everything to do with interconnected resources - especially in the preparatory stages. Of course you’ll always need specific applications to produce the final, refined output (the final copy for the magazine I’m translating for will eventually go into InCopy, which I use to edit files on a client’s server in Germany - there’s no way I could do that from an iPad… or at least, not yet!). I loved my netbook, and still occasionally use it. But the iPad is so fast and convenient, has such astonishing battery life, and even in a relatively lowly form (as I said, it’s only an iPad 2), is so powerful, that I feel no need to drag slow, balky, short-lived computers around with me any more.

Just as well, really, because I managed to empty a glass of water all over my Windows notebook yesterday, and am currently waiting for it to dry out…