iPad dock and keyboard
I just took delivery of my iPad dock and real keyboard. It's great to be able to actually type on this thing!
However, it's clear that the iPhone OS was not designed with keyboards in mind. There are dozens of missed opportunities for things that could "just work" that don't.
The biggest shortcoming is that you can't navigate between apps from the keyboard. At least I've not discovered how, if it's possible. I tried some of the usual suspects like Command-Tab which is a nice feature for process switching on Mac OS X, but nothing. None of the command keys or arrow keys will help you select an app to launch. You have to touch the screen....
And Tab doesn't work in a lot of other contexts, either, to move the text cursor from one place to the next. And when you're typing something like a URL and the suggestions drop below, you can't get to them with the keyboard (down-arrow, tab, etc).
And worst of all, I can't use Blogger in "Compose" mode with the iPad at all. It doesn't seem to recognize the keyboard at all. I'm typing this in "Edit Html" mode.
The other thing I wish for is a horizontal orientation for the dock, so I could put the keyboard under the long edge of the iPad, instead of the short edge. That's a much more familiar way to look at the screen, in Landscape mode.
Astonishingly, you can select text from the keyboard the same way as Mac OS X, by holding down the Shift key as you use the arrow keys. I didn't expect THAT to work, but it does! And Command-C Command-V work for copy/paste, which is nice....
By iPad iV they might have horizontal docking. I'll cross my fingers. I'll settle for Preferences that let you set the key repeat rate for now.
However, it's clear that the iPhone OS was not designed with keyboards in mind. There are dozens of missed opportunities for things that could "just work" that don't.
The biggest shortcoming is that you can't navigate between apps from the keyboard. At least I've not discovered how, if it's possible. I tried some of the usual suspects like Command-Tab which is a nice feature for process switching on Mac OS X, but nothing. None of the command keys or arrow keys will help you select an app to launch. You have to touch the screen....
And Tab doesn't work in a lot of other contexts, either, to move the text cursor from one place to the next. And when you're typing something like a URL and the suggestions drop below, you can't get to them with the keyboard (down-arrow, tab, etc).
And worst of all, I can't use Blogger in "Compose" mode with the iPad at all. It doesn't seem to recognize the keyboard at all. I'm typing this in "Edit Html" mode.
The other thing I wish for is a horizontal orientation for the dock, so I could put the keyboard under the long edge of the iPad, instead of the short edge. That's a much more familiar way to look at the screen, in Landscape mode.
Astonishingly, you can select text from the keyboard the same way as Mac OS X, by holding down the Shift key as you use the arrow keys. I didn't expect THAT to work, but it does! And Command-C Command-V work for copy/paste, which is nice....
By iPad iV they might have horizontal docking. I'll cross my fingers. I'll settle for Preferences that let you set the key repeat rate for now.
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