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iPhone Blogging

Entry 818, on 2008-07-22 at 21:33:24 (Rating 1, Computers)

I am writing this blog entry on my iPhone. You might ask how I can be bothered using the small keyboard, but I have found a possible solution! I am using a free program called WritingPad which allows me to enter whole words with one gesture.

It works like this: I just drag over the letters of the word I want to enter on a displayed keyboard forming a shape. For example, to enter the word iPhone I just drag over i,p,h,o,n,e. The program guesses the most likely word and even figures out the capitalisation for me (wow that word capitalisation was a tough one!)

This is still not as quick and easy as using a full size keyboard of course, but if I don't have my Mac with me it is a reasonable alternative. And I can't make a spelling error because only words in the dictionary are used.

I am finding I actually use the Mac less now because the iPhone can do a lot of the simple tasks it did, like checking mail, viewing RSS feeds, viewing web pages, and making notes. Whether this will work long term or is just a gimmick is too early to say just yet!

These are certainly a few things Apple needs to work on to make the iPhone even better. The most widely known criticism is the lack of copy and paste functionality. I really need this. The Newton had it but the iPhone doesn't. As I have said in the past I treat the iPhone more like a handheld computer than a phone, so these computer functions are important to me.

Well its early in the development of the iPhone still so I am prepared to experiment and put up with a few problems until these issues are resolved. Now here's a problem. I need to copy and paste this text into Safari now but I will have go through the Mac instead.

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