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 inspiration, but the actual editing operations themselves should happen as close as possible to the speed of thought. After all, they're only "tasks".

"Give me a for instance."

"For instance let's chop down the opening sentence of 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Let's cut it to the end after "worst of times" on an iPhone. We'll do it three different ways. The first two on the very popular iAWriter which along with finger-painting offers its "tapper-selector" method... (all highlighting all the time - 100% under the Microsoft Whammy). And then we go to Notebooks 10 which offers connective editing. One Touch!

Remember: highlighting to delete is connection by garbage disposal.

Which is DUMB!!!

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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...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

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