AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

                         THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Good morning, Del! Good morning to you, my beautiful Juula! What's the matter, you look sad. No, I'm impatient. I want a sneak peak at some of the things that connective editing can do. Before the bla-bla-bla explanations? Yeah... just like that. Are you afraid they're gonna pull the plug and put me out of my misery? Stop it, Del, please! I'm sorry. All right here's a quick and dirty demo. But then we'll do it right, we'll explain it calmly, all right? I promise!

                        THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Guten morgen, Schatz! Danke, meine Liebe! What have you got for me today? Well, I wanted to show you how one single Connective Editing button obeying a simple instruction, has got all the other editing apps for handhelds beat - and as a matter of fact it's even snappier than what's normal on a regular sit-on-your butt computer. Wow... I'm all in. Actually, you ARE! Because this new single instruction will be the new DEL. And any app would be foolish to ignore the wonderful ease and power it offers. But then... But then... ? I want to be on a keyboard too! You do? Yes, I want to marry you and live on an extra keyboard row with you. Have you been smoking something, Juula? Absolutely not. I never do that stuff. Right, sorry... I didn't mean it that way. I want to join you and be a second button that completes the new DEL. Then if we have children, the DEL and JUULA family can revolutionize editing. I love it. I know it soun

                       THE STORY OF DEL - Delete " Buongiorno Del! Come va ?" " Bene bellezza, mia . What do you have for me today?" "We're gonna reason a few things through regarding text editing on handhelds." "For instance? "Well, when discussing anything, it's always a good idea to provide some givens. For example:" 1) Compared to the ease of selection on regular computers, with their big physical keyboards, mice, shift-arrows and function keys, highlighting text on the flat screens (phones, tablets and phablets) is torture. "Definitely! But the problem is the handhelds are basically content-retrieval systems." "Maybe they are now, but they don't have to be. No, it's entirely a matter of poor design. Excuse the vulgarity, but piss-poor design!" "I have good reason to believe you, mi amor!" "The second given:" 2) When editing, the writing part can happen at the variable speeds of ins

                      THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Hi Del, how are you feeling today?" "Still kicking, Juula." "Where were we?" "You were talking about the 4 main reasons for bothering to select text, which on handhelds, is mostly done by dragging mini-handles - a real bummer." "Right. For writers and scribes, it represents the biggest design fail of all times. Sadly foisted on humanity by the greatest design genius of all times." Minihandles! - Yecch! "All right, let's focus on deletion. Remember this?" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas "Yes." In the preparatory "selection" phase, before effectuating the obvious deletion, it becomes this:" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox →Christmas "What do you notice?!  "For deletion, the only text I'm interested in is the one just beyond the end of the selected words!&qu

                     THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Hi Del, are you ready for more exciting adventures in text editing?" "You are the sunshine of my life!" "I'll take that to mean yes. Yesterday you said something spot on!" "I did?" "Yes sir... You said: "We humans end the selection where we do to CONNECT to the sense of what is being written." Absolutely true! Sometimes the words even seem to call each other: Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas "Thinking things through last night I discovered how Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates put a whammy on text editing. To be polite I called it the 'Microsoft Anomaly'. Are you ready for it?" "Fire away!" The Microsoft Anomaly God is in the details (And so is Bill Gates) Why does one go through the trouble of highlighting text? Principally for 4 reasons (of course I'm generalizing). 1. To format - that is, to prettify deservi

                    THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del, while you were sleeping I prepared an outline." "Good morning, Juula!" "Are you ready?" "Fire away!" William Shakespeare highlights text and then hits Backspace Then a monkey who's been sipping Chardonnay all day does the same thing As we've seen, in both cases the value just beyond the tippy-tippy end of the highlighting (no matter what it is) gets connected to the cursor position. Therefore we may say that highlighting to delete is connective in its blind mechanics . Whether Shakespeare does it or a drunken monkey, or me or you, or a pigeon in Japan, the same thing always happens - and we instinctively know it. The value beyond the tippy-tippy end of the highlighting gets connected to the cursor position. But what is the difference between Shakespeare's act and the monkey's? What sets us humans apart from the apes and other animals vis-à-vis such editing operati

                     THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Her name is Pilù and along with bananas she's fond of fruits, leaves, roots, and sometimes - especially in the mating season - other primates. So be careful!" "Pilù, Pilù, I love you! Don't eat me, I love you!" For reasons unknown, Pilù fell instantly and madly in love with Del. The French call it a 'coup de foudre,' a bolt of lightning, but this was worse: Cupid had fired a bazooka. Monkey love is very strong! "Yes... I love you too, Pilù! Je t'aime mon petit chou-chou. Juula, now that I have found my kindred spirit, I can’t see myself bothering with keyboards anymore and so..." "No, Del, please! Don't go turning me into something crazy! Wait! First let's FOCUS on what we have to do! Here, give Pilù this tablet." S he passed the chimp an iPad Mini with a text editor open on Shakespeare's Hamlet. "Yes, sorry, you're right." Unprompted, Pilù was already

                    THE STORY OF DEL - Delete The machines went nuts: DLING-BLING-WAAAAAA! But this time, Juula nipped the reaction in the bud. "No, no, calm down!" "Sorry." "Del, honey, you just said the 'operative' word: 'LINK'." LINK "For zapping paragraphs, the pilcrow is a LINK and for zapping words, the space bar space is a LINK. The command for both is the same: Look to the left of the cursor, see what's there, and then cancel rightward up to and including that same value. The New Del? YES! 'Connective reading' has been around a long time and everybody is familiar with it... It's called 'Browsing.' Well now we have 'Connective Editing.' CONNECTIVE EDITING And browsing and connective editing even have a few things in common. For instance, distance doesn’t matter. One touch zaps any paragraph no matter if composed of a single word or a thousand. So it's like a mouse click on a browser link: it d

                   THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came to his 'coma-present' senses again with a blissful smile. And she was right there by his side with her smartphone in her hand. "Hi Del... How are we doing?" "Great, Juula! And so happy to see you again!"  "While you were sleeping, I programmed our little paragraph killer." "Ah yes, the pilcrow connector." "Want to see?" Juula held her smartphone up to the slits of Del's bandaged head - a look definitely reminiscent of the Invisible Man - and zapped a whole bunch of paragraphs in rapid succession, at single 'semi-automatic' taps. "Wow! That's faster than a computer."  "Faster and with less anatomy involved. On a phone, no less! But that's nothing. Ready for another short geography expedition?" "Lead the way!" "Okay, first we click that toggle again: 'show non-printing characters.' Okay, last time you saw the pilcro

                  THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Exactly right. The common topography of any text!" "Now this is where your old keyboard job comes into play. Knowing that there's a pilcrow before and after every paragraph... how does that inescapable fact favor deleting paragraphs? Put on your thinking cap!" "Hmm... well first you have to select..." "BZZZZ! Wrong!" Alarmed, Del quickly corrected himself: "No, no, no... I don't have to select.... but you'd better give me a hint, Juula... or you know what could happen!" "Okay, here's the hint: it's forward deletion, like what you've always done, but with a twist - a slightly different instruction." "Okay, a new instruction... We have a paragraph, and like all paragraphs there's a doohickey..." "A pilcrow!" "...A pilcrow before and after. No selection allowed." Arnold Schwarzenegger to the rescue! That Austrian weightlifter -

                 THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "All right, buckle up. Here's a copy and paste job from the internet: '100 Best First Lines from Novels'."  Best first lines from novels "We'll take out the graphics and leave only the words. Only plain text. Now look carefully and tell me what you see?" Del looked long and hard and failing to see anything meaningful, was afraid that his bruised ego would be tempted to transform her into a paramecium or a postcard of the Matterhorn. But instead he held strong and steady and was even shot through with a pertinent thought regarding such awful transformations: Luckily for us, God had a good attention span! We love to say 'it's a crazy world,' but actually, it's not crazy at all. It works. A beautiful Estonian girl doesn’t turn into a flower pot or a boxing glove on a sudden divine whim. God was… "Del, hello? Del?" "Oh... Nothing, comes to mind, Juula. I mean I see words of course.