Category: technology

iPad has plenty of useful applications for multiple purposes; coupled with an unlimited 3G data plan, the tablet is almost there to be an all-around laptop replacement for productivity/utility purposes as well as media and entertainment use (its real forté). Almost. Typing with the virtual keyboard is really painful for anything except short notes like status updates in social media, or quick email replies. Since iPad supports bluetooth, it is perfectly possible to use it with full wireless keyboards. I have been using the Apple Wireless Keyboard for this purpose some time now, and it has made a real change in terms of usability for writing, of course. Unfortunately the iOS does not support keyboad shortcuts except for some basic actions, like copy-and-paste. I have not found a shortcut that would switch between applications in cmd-tab style — iOS 4.2 supports multitasking in iPad, after all. No way to go to the home screen and launch applications with keyboard only, either. Typing email with the keyboard is fine, but to send the message, you need to tap into the touch screen. The final resulting use experience is a sort of weird hybrid, having features of PC style interaction, and tablet/touchscreen actions, all mixed together a bit uncomfortably. But after some practice you can get it, I guess. The final lesson is newertheless that iPad is not intented as a full laptop replacement, and putting some extra money can you get something like the new version of Macbook Air, where keyboard and screen are already fitted together with an OS that supports a real desktop environment. But if your laptop is taken away for repairs (like my case), then you can get away with iPad and an add-on keyboard for some time, with some extra effort.

One of the clear strengths of social media lies in its capabilities for filtering – sometimes dubbed ‘collective intelligence’ by a fancy name. Wisdom of the crowds helps in finding those golden nuggets among all that chaff. One of the most useful tools (apart from Flipboard for iPad, which is sort of half-way there) is the Paper.li web-based service which builds a news-site style layout of the most popular materials that have been circulating among your Twitter contacts during the last 24 hours. Rather than trying to follow the buzzing stream around the clock and checking out everything personally, it is now possible to see what were the ‘trending topics’ that were recently shared and discussed in the network. This is still an ‘alpha’ release, but already rather usable and worth testing out. Here is link to “Frans Mäyrä Daily”: http://paper.li/fransmayra

Finnish is one of the languages that are not happy with the basic, US centric ASCII character set: in order to make sense, we need also all those fancy umlauts, also known as “ääkköset”.

It is currently possible to get umlauts and accented characters by pressing and holding certain US keys in iPad, but typing anything but a single sentence that way is too much work. There is also a “Finnish Keyboard” app published for the device, but that has a non-standard keyboard layout and it does not integrate with the other apps, making it waste of money.

The system I have found to work best is to install and use iPhone rather than iPad apps for writing Finnish in iPad. For some reason the full Finnish keyboard emerges when you launch the iPhone app – probably the iOS of iPad has also the iPhone software libraries (necessary for running those iPhone apps in native mode), and the Scandinavian languages are supported in iPhone so – voilà – there you have the Finnish keyboard in iPad. It is a good idea to press that “2X” button at lower right corner to have more comfortable writing room. WriteRoom is currently my favourite app for those writing works; it is simple, focused on distraction-free typing and has sync to online service (at http://www.simpletext.ws) that does its job for importing text to PC.

According to tech news, iOS 4.2 should arrive in November and bring support to new languages, so supposedly true iPad text editors such as Pages will get their Finnish keyboard layouts later this year. Meanwhile, the iPhone app workaround appears to be the best solution I have found.