Chapter 21 - Words and paragraphs have their own incorporated quick deletion links.

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 pilcrows and then... what else? Do you remember?"

"The little spacebar space dots between the words."

With an irresistible smile, that not only curled Del's toes, but also his shins (normally not possible, but after the accident, many of his lower extremities had become quadruple-jointed), Juula started zapping single words on her phone in rapid succession.

"Holy cow! That's fantastic!"

"Yes. The same command that zaps paragraphs at a single touch, also zaps words, because almost every word in the universe has a spacebar space in front of it and a spacebar space after."

Del was thrilled. "I used to do something like that with CTRL. CTRL-DEL used to zap words."

"Of course, but that required two hands. This is even faster. One button one touch!"

"It's as if every paragraph and every word had its own incorporated quick-deletion link."

"Del, my sweetheart..."

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Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...

Chapter 26 - For scribes and writers, the biggest design fail came from the best designer of all time!

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!...

Chapter 27 - If it takes you more than one touch to cancel to the end of a sentence, you're working too hard.

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...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

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