So the native docs app sucks, for reasons I will get into soon enough. The views are great. Web layout, for instance, automatically adjusts the width of the text when you enlarge or shrink the screen. Only a fraction of apps in the universe can pull that off. But a few unforgiveables have ensued.
Sadly I couldn’t log onto Verizon Wireless tonight and see the deals on the Samsung tablets they’d emailed me about, didn’t feel like searching my inbox for deleted emails…
So here I am back at WordPress, the only reliable writing thingy on a Fire. I’ve often thought to myself, the limits that a more modest tablet will impose are productive. You work with that one app that works, you stick with it, you eventually ask no questions, you don’t bother with tedious comparisons. So even though it saves locally, I reject the docs app, which at this point I’m not even sure is native. Am I confusing the issue?
Three bluetooth keyboards have had problems staying connected to the Fire. My Windows laptop, though, has the same issue with bluetooth speakers and headphones. So Christ, do I want to risk it with an Android tablet, or invest in an iPad? I need an iPad. But iPads don’t let you buy stuff directly in the Kindle app.
Apple, you are so threatened by the Amazon bookstore that you force us to make this kind of decision?
The pleasure of shopping within the Kindle app is, for me, without parallel. I find the deals. The bargain bookstore a few miles from here just closed; the owner retired, sold it off. Most of the authors I’ve fallen in love with over the past few years have been from Kindle deals (that I learned about via Bookbub, the only company whose emails I truly look forward to): Nell Zink, Ottessa Moshfegh, Mary Karr (although I’d dabbled with her Lit before, I hadn’t yet read The Liar’s Club, a game changer for reasons completely unrelated to this post).
The central question is WHERE DO I WRITE?
This tablet, whose tiny pricetag on a particularly broke-ass Christmas I cannot forget, lets me write in WordPress. That’s it–barring Evernote, which works fine except it doesn’t enable the Ctrl shortcuts (for skipping across and deleting entire words), an indispensible feature of any writing app, let it be known. I cannot write without Ctrl.
And that’s Part One of why the native docs app turns out to be solid shite. Part Two: Did it really just kick me off my keyboard when I switched between “web layout” and “page layout”?
Why this conspiracy against hassle-free blogging? From all conceivable angles, my own included?
That’s the keyword here–blogging. I am scarcely a writer, though I teach writing for a living. Nay–I am, at heart, a blogger. I write to connect with people without waiting for whether my missives have been accepted; just publish. Spit off that tall bridge, see whom it hits.
Just don’t forget the tags.
Wait, possible interference. Bluetooth was enabled on my iPhone this whole time?
Prose without a Home 