Chapter 25 - The Microsoft Whammy - How Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates messed up editing for humanity.

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 deserving text that will live on in the final document.

2. To copy and paste - that is, to repeat deserving text that will live on in the final document.

3. To cut and paste - that is, to better position deserving text that will live on in the final document.

and then

4. To destroy undeserving text that obviously will NOT live on in the final document. Notice the anomaly? We are forced to lavish the same attention on the garbage as the deserving words - the gems

Let's polish these, or copy them or maybe move them

Let keen eye maneuver pudgy finger to drag small handle over tiny text until the selection glow is just right and then... destroy!!! (kinda like polishing a vase before smashing it with a sledgehammer)

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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 18 - Juula promises to get a "new and improved" DEL back on phones and tablets

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

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