Typing on an iPad is a very different experience.  I learnt to touch type on a manual typewriter, my teacher was of the old school and she expected us to know where all the keys were without looking down on the keyboard.  Thanks to her I can now take notes at meetings or conferences without looking at my computer and that makes it very much easier as it means I don’t have to change my glasses in order to read what I’m typing, I can just keep typing while looking at the room or looking up at the white board or screen or just close my eyes. As an aside, I always wonder what people think when they see me close my eyes while continuing to type.

What makes this possible is a keyboard I can feel, with raised dots on two of the ‘home’ keys, the ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys, the ones I rest my forefingers on. I recall in 1980, when Dad bought a Sinclair ZX80 home computer, having great trouble with the keyboard as it was a membrane keyboard and there was very little tactile information coming back to me from my fingers.  It was very annoying to type with, I had to look down at my fingers and I had no idea where the keys were (this could be another article entirely). The computer itself was very annoying as it had almost no memory and the only way you could store programmes was to save them onto audio cassette which rarely loaded them back onto the computer, we found it less time consuming and easier on the nerves to type it all in again every time we wanted that programme. We also ran into problems when someone else wanted to watch TV as it used the TV as a display. The fact that there were several of us all wanting a go didn’t help. Anyway, if you want more information about them you can google it yourself and not rely on my fading memory, what I was wanting to write about is typing on the iPad.

The iPad has an onscreen keyboard.  It’s a little smaller than a regular laptop but not so small that I can’t fit my hands on it, it’s handy having small hands sometimes. The problem is it has no tactile feedback, no little raised bumps on any of the keys and I get absolutely zero feedback as to if I’m actually hitting the keys, let along the right keys.  I am managing to type quite a bit on it but I do need to spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard which is not so good for my neck. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m starting to spend less time looking and I’m even getting some of the typing right despite not looking at it.

One thing that helps enormously is the predictive text programmed into the iPad.  Little things like capitalising the word ‘I’ are challenging as you need to hit the arrow to make the letter a capital then hit the letter then the space bar so it makes me have to think about typing this one letter word. Thanks to predictive text by just hitting the space bar both before and after the letter I find it’s capitalised the word. It also helps in so many other ways often completing the words for me but sometimes it has its drawbacks and gives me a word I’m not wanting to use making the sentence make absolutely no sense.

I’m going to continue using the iPad for typing as it’s really useful while I’m out and about, it’s going to be awesome for my travels in NZ and I plan to use it for writing quite a bit. I have several articles for both this blog and someone else’s blog I’ve been planning for a while but haven’t had time to write so I’ll be taking the opportunity of being away from most of my other activities to catch up on many of these articles.