Problems With Everything

So I've been spending a lot of time with my iPad.

This makes sense, of course, because my iPad serves as my main computing device. At the same time, I've alluded in previous posts to this newfound sense of purpose and clarity with what my "computing device" really needs to do: no longer do I hang out in front of the screen idly checking Twitter and Facebook and email while chatting and streaming a Netflix movie at the same time.

So, what am I doing with all this iPad time?

There's a lot of productive what-have-you happening, of course; I'm getting marginally (only marginally) better at responding to emails, and I'm getting a lot of writing done on the side. But one thing I am finding is that I'm spending more time developing new habits I never had before. Namely, I check the NY Times headlines every day (because the app for it is so clear-cut and newspaper-formatted), and every day instead of aimless Facebook / lost-in-the-ether time, I do the NY Times crossword puzzle.

The NY Times crossword puzzle app, I have to admit, is the reason I wanted an iPad in the first place. I saw a friend post a picture of him using his, and I thought to myself that if doing a crossword were so clean, simple, and non-pencil-involving, I might be able to convince myself to actually do it. After all, you don't even have to seek out a newspaper to purchase. It's right at your fingertips, and with the click of a button, you can check out all of the clues you didn't get the next day.

How many articles have I read in the last few months that allude to crossword puzzles saving the brainpower of mankind?!

And so on weekend mornings, I sit with my muesli and fruit and cold-brewed iced coffee at my kitchen counter, and I do as much of the crossword as I possibly can before giving up and passing the torch on to my roommate or whichever friend(s) happen to be hanging out at our apartment that day. It feels strangely centered, and a little bit old-fashioned, which is funny for obvious reasons.

This simple sense of contentment, however, is countered by the realization that there is nothing remotely resembling proper formatting in any word processing app available for the iPad. I've been wanting to write about this for weeks, but at the end of the day that's all there is to say about it. If you really need to write a functional outline that you want to show people, or you need to use tables in Pages, or you need to do basically anything at all that requires presentation-style formatting, you're totally screwed. Which is funny because this is really meant to serve in place of a computer when you're on business trips and might very well need to use that sort of formatting most.

You win some, you fail some.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad