Losing things on the Underground and general breaking of other things

Would you like to know what happens if you drop something down the gap between the train and the platform in an Underground station? I shall tell you.

Luckily it was not me who dropped something (though I almost did once), but I got onto the platform just as a train was leaving. I sighed and stopped hop-skipping (my foot, although castless, is still sore), then noticed as the train pulled away that there were more Transport for London (tfl) employees on the platform than normal. One of them was standing right on the platform edge, feet either side of the yellow line, and pointing a red torch down the tunnel.

We waited for the next train. As it came around the corner of the tunnel, it slowed down and stopped just where the tfl woman was standing with her red torch. The driver came out of his driver cabin to see what was happening. Another tfl employee with one of those long grabber things reached down into the trench beside the platform and retrieved a man's phone, and then the torch lady turned her torch to green, the driver went back to drive the train, and everything went back to normal.

Now I kind of want to drop something down there to see it all again. I won't though, I promise.

Speaking of dropping things, a very sad thing happened to my iPad last Wednesday. It slid off a table and I caught it on my feet, but then it slid off my feet and onto the floor. It only dropped about ten centimetres onto a hard surface (my feet are not that hard) and I thought it would be fine, but apparently Gorilla Glass is not as durable as one might think. A spider of cracks is all along one corner, which I stupidly poked at to brush the glass off and got a splinter in my finger.

I checked my bag to see if I had any sellotape to cover it with until I could get it to an Apple shop and see what could be done with it, but no luck. I was having dinner before a meetup, so thought I'd ask the cafe if they had some. They didn't. They did have a first-aid kit, however, so now I have a big sticking plaster across one corner. Very anthropomorphic.

Unfortunately they can't very easily replace screens on iPad 2s (something to do with the screen being attached with glue) so you have to get a replacement iPad which is rather a lot of money. So for the moment I'm keeping with my sticking plaster solution.

I thought about nail-polish, though most internet people say it's not a good idea, what with the primary liquid stage of nail-polish and the electronics etc. etc. Then I started thinking about exactly which colour might look the best, and whether it should be sparkly.

I may have to restrain myself...

Posted with Blogsy

iPad again: keyboards

Continuing on from my last iPad post...

First off I got ia writer, which syncs with Dropbox, and opened it to find... Arrow keys! I think I actually screamed. I had resigned myself to no arrow keys, and then there they were! And on top of that, a dedicated apostrophe button! Awesome.

So I tried it out, taking my iPad out into the big wide world and writing a small chunk of story. Great! Very happy! Then I wanted to make some notes in another document, so I opened one and did a few notes, then tried to get back to my main work. Catastrophe! I'd been working in a Dropbox file, and because I was offline and had closed it down by opening the new document, I could no longer access it. So what happened to the work I did on it? I guess next time I'll work on a local file....

As long as I work locally or on iCloud, everything goes fine. So I have been doing that, until I figure out the Dropbox thing...

Typing on the iPad is actually not as hard as you think, and you can just about touch-type. Ia writer has the best keyboard layout, but you can only use it when you're actually in the app so it doesn't help for typing web addresses or using Blogsy (as I am now). So I've had to get my fingers to memorise two different types of iPad keyboard layout, on top of the three physical keyboard layouts I've trained them for (UK, US and French. Very useful for writing French essays). And sometimes I get confused, jabbing at buttons that aren't there.

A touch keyboard does mean you hit bad keys much more than you would on a normal keyboard, but the spell check for the most part does a reasonable job of correcting things (until it doesn't, and you have to go back without using arrow keys and fix it...).

My biggest problem at the moment is not hitting the space bar, but hopefully that will fix itself in time.

My new iPad. Kind of.

I am writing this on my new iPad! Well, it's an iPad 2, so I'm not sure if i can say 'new iPad', but still, I got it last week and have been experimenting on it.

I'm having fun attempting to play the piano (not particularly possible with the app I have) and drawing right on the screen. I've always wished I could have a backspace button on actual pen-and-paper drawing, and now it's almost like I do. The app I have doesn't colour in exactly like coloured pencils, though, so I've got to figure out a way to get the effects I want without layering the same as I would with real pencils.

But... Writing! I was quite excited to start syncing my iPad with Scrivener, so I set myself up with Dropbox and a text editor, went into Scrivener, looked for the sync button and... It's not there!!!!! I have the Windows version, which doesn't have syncing yet, so I have to find another way to do things until they update it.

In the meantime, I've been trying to find out all the little secrets that help you type quickly on an iPad screen, and realising how much I rely on some things that do not exist on a virtual keyboard. Good tip: pressing and holding the comma will give you an apostrophe, or, even better, swiping up on the comma will do the same thing. Most other things I can work around (though I find I keep pressing the space bar by mistake), but I soon realised an important set of buttons that are missing. The arrow keys.

Where be-eth my arrow keys? I searched online and found a few forums with people arguing for and against arrow keys (why do you need them on a touch-based system, people argue), but I would really, really like some arrow keys. It's annoying to have to zoom in and out when you want to move the cursor one or two letters, especially when the autocorrect has done something stupid and you want to fix just one letter. I've since found that if you touch and hold, a little magnifying glass appears and you can move the cursor easier, but I still would like my arrow keys. Fingers are too big to move the cursor quickly. Apple should add some arrow keys.

Ooh! Or maybe they could ship tiny pet fairies with the device, and you could get the fairies to move the cursor. I think if Apple could do that, I would be happy.