a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad (blogging) day!
I recently gave in and bought an iPad 3 which at night sleeps on the floor beside my bed. When I wake up, I pull it from its case, wake it gently up, type in my password, check my blog and email. But I definitely have a love-hate relationship with it at this point. Apple has always annoyed me with their “We’re so much cooler than anyone else” factor and it seems to me that they do too many things differently just to do them differently. For instance, when I write emails on my iPad, I can’t indent, underline or use bold type. For heaven’s sake, why can’t I do that? You can even do those things on an ancient typewriter (OK, not bold type, but…) My friend say why would anyone want them? She never uses those things in an email. I guess I’m old school. If I send you the name of a book, I want to underline it. I’d like to be able to indent paragraphs without hitting the space bar five times if I like. After all, I’m a grammar nazi, for heaven’s sake! You’re cramping my style here. If you’re so cool, why limit my options? I took a beginning iPad class a few days ago, (took about two months to get into one), and when I mentioned that you can Google how to do things on the iPad if you can’t find the info in the how-to-use-it-intuitively book, the instructor made a face akin to having taken a bite of something not-quite-fresh and said well, yes, you could, but that information wouldn’t be Apple-approved (although she didn’t use that exact phrase.) Do they really think people sit around all day thinking up ways to fake people out with how-to-use-the-iPad information that doesn’t work?
Although I’ve had friends tell me using an Apple product is intuitive, I don’t find it so. Perhaps for those who’ve had one it is or perhaps I’m just not intuitive (although I often guess my Christmas presents in advance.) But for someone raised first with a typewriter, who then moved on to a PC, I guess I haven’t acclimated yet. I feel much like Jane Austen’s Emma, who bounces back and forth aloud when Mr. Knightly goes to visit his brother and she’s not sure what said brother will tell him…“But if he seems sad then I shall know that John has advised him not to marry Harriet. I love John! Or, he may seem sad because he fears telling me that he is going to marry my friend! How could John let him do that? I hate John!”
The iPad has a great camera. I love my iPad.
The iPad is set up so differently. I can never find anything. I hate my iPad.
The iPad is easy to carry with me. I love my iPad.
The iPad keyboard a pain to use. If you barely touch a key, it types. I hate my iPad.
The iPad can do all sorts of cool things. I love my iPad.
Today my iPad delivered the final nail in my bad-blogging-day coffin when, while struggling to figure out how to save some photos from my marvelous iPad camera in my WordPress gallery, (and naturally you have to have an iPad app to get WordPress for the iPad to do this), I inadvertently posted all of them…with no title…no categories…no tags…no nothing…to all my followers. Even though I rushed to delete the post, after an agonizing number of minutes, it came through anyway. I hate my iPad.
That in itself wouldn’t have been quite so bad (although bad enough) if earlier, on my PC laptop, I hadn’t inadvertently hit “Publish” when I’d meant to “Save Draft” and sent out my second post of the day, when that post was meant to be sent tomorrow. My iPad-induced post was #3. Big fat sigh. Talk about overload.
My desire for professionalism took a bad hit. In the scheme of things (horrendous forest fires and burned houses in Colorado, thousands without power from storms across the eastern US, fighting in Syria, droughts–disasters of a more important and distressing nature), this was the most infinitesimal blip on the horizon. But I felt as though I’ve let down my blog followers as well as myself and there’s no good way to say, “Sorry for clogging your mailbox with a post I didn’t mean to make, with pictures I planned to use in a different way at a different time.” Because to do that I’d have to…post yet another post! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I hate my iPad (at least for now.) But I’ll love it again; I can just intuit it! 🙂
This, that and the other thing 
I think you share these problems with probably another million users. I want a macbook with windows 7. I would ask apple for this, but my husband said: please don’t, that’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve heard…. Yeaaah… I know…. ;o)))
Probably all you have to do is buy the app in the privacy of your own home. I did get “Pages” instead of “Word”, (“Word” for Apple people) but I really miss knowing just how to do at least a modicum of things. Re-learning is a pain and the instruction book doesn’t cover nearly enough. I always worry that if I click on an unknown icon, something bad will happen and I won’t be able to undo it. 🙂
Re-learning transformated me to a mushroom cloud :o)
I can completely identify with that!! 🙂 Hope the cloud’s dissipated by now.