Why am I reviewing the iPad after playing with it for only two hours last week at PJM/PJTV HQ? Haven’t we had a sufficient number of such reviews from people far more qualified than I? Google hits for iPad reviews are currently at 870,000! Why make that 870,001?
No special reason other than it’s Saturday and I’m sipping a home brewed cappuccino in true neo-yuppie style and, well, I am a writer and was curious about certain things – particularly about whether the iPad was good for “inputting text” (horrid computerese for writing). I knew it would look slick. I am a loyal servant of Lord Steve and already own a MacBookPro and an iPhone and rate Apple products high on the aesthetics scale (important to me). But I had read the iPad was essentially for passively consuming books. magazines, video, etc., not for creating them.
Nevertheless, shortly after firing up an iPad for the first time, ooh and aahing over various things, turning the virtual pages of Winnie-the-Pooh and so forth (Self-promotion alert: My Moses Wine detective series will be republished for the iPad on iBooks later this year), I ponied up ten bucks and downloaded Apple’s Pages word processor and gave it a try. Could you actually write on this damn thing with any fluidity?
Well, yes, you can. At least I could, right on its virtual keyboard in landscape mode. I could rattle on pretty quickly, almost as quickly as I am right now on my MacBookPro with an external keyboard. But to be clear, I’m not sure I actually touch type. I do something of my own invention – or evolution. I started typing at age 12 because, for reasons which long since escape me, I was enrolled in a seventh grade typing class. Fairly shortly I was typing rapidly, but I’m not sure even now, many decades later, that I have memorized the QWERTY keyboard. I kind of half look at it, like a latter-day typing class cheater. So that’s what I was doing on the iPad.
Now could I write a novel on it? I suppose. After all, teenage Japanese girls write bestsellers on cellphones. This would be a heck of a lot easier than that. In fact, it might loosen you up. The device might begin to feel less technological (and off-putting) than a computer and more like the yellow pad we writers favor when we’re being “creative.” This is, of course, too early to tell, but I suspect something is brewing here. Whether this will also be true for screenplays, with their formatting issues, is another matter. But I wouldn’t be surprised if industry leader Final Draft is cooking up an iPad app.
One final note on word processors in general: MS Word has far outgrown its usefulness for creative writers. It’s way too complicated and seems an industrial product more fit for writing corporate brochures. I am doing most of my writing these days on Bean, a free download for the Mac I highly recommend. It loads much faster than Word, has a simple full screen mode, doesn’t bother you with unhelpful hints, and even saves in the latest Word formats, so you can email your manuscripts to any publishers patient enough to read them.
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