I which I am grumpy about changes
Oct. 7th, 2013 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayI'm having to make a small change to my writing set-up, which is kind of a pain but may not be as bad as I'd been thinking yesterday.
My writing time is split about half and half between sitting at my desktop, using Word, and using my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard so I can write from my sofa or propped up in bed. I've got particular things that I can only write from the sofa/bed (sex scenes) and particular things that I generally need to write at the desktop (big action scenes that require referring to lots of notes, floorplans and Lego figures) and everything else is down to where I happen to be most comfortable that day.
Weirdly, I find that I get more words down on the page when I'm working on my iPad because I feel less distracted. You'd think it would be more distracting, because of all the procrastinating apps, but it's really not.
When I first bought my iPad, I was using Google Docs for my on-the-move writing and transferring the files between my desktop and Google Drive. I prefer to edit in Word because Google's dictionary makes the Word dictionary look almost accurate. It seems to work on a random word system because it frequently highlights real words with red squiggles and refuses to learn they're real. If I'm having to ignore too many random red squiggles I eventually stop seeing them so I edit in Word, where the squiggles are slightly less likely to be on valid words.
Let's not discuss Word's annoyed habit of thinking American and British spellings are equally valid when it's set to British English. No, Word, that's not how spelling works.
I've been using Quickoffice Pro HD on my iPad, in large part because it synced well with Google Docs. And then last year, for about two months, it stopped being able to edit Google Docs. So I bit the bullet and set up DropBox, which is so much easier to manage that I really don't want to go back to Google Docs for writing. And it synced really well with Quickoffice. (I still use Google for odds and ends of temporary non-writing stuff and shared spreadsheets, so I've not got rid of it totally.)
What I didn't know until last night is that Google bought Quickoffice a while ago and they're now decommissioning it. The replacement app will only work with Google Docs, not DropBox. And the old app will stop supporting cloud storage of any kind in the next couple of months. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth.
When I was originally looking for a good word processing app for the iPad, I didn't consider Pages because it didn't synch at all with Google Docs. But now I'm DropBoxing for all my writing and it turns out that importing and exporting to DropBox with Pages is really, really easy. So I guess I'm learning a new app that may actually be a bit more functional than Quickoffice, which had some quirks that used to drive me absolutely batty.
I'll grab the Quickoffice replacement app for working with the Google Docs that I do still use and Pages will now be my main writing/word processing app, with DropBox remaining as my connection to my desktop. It's probably going to take me a couple of days to get used to using a different app, but on first view it looks like it's going to be much easier to sync it all together than I'd feared.
I've also finally got round to setting my iPad back to using British English spellings again :-D That must have got changed when I updated to iOS6 and, uh, it's taken me a year to put it back...
Oops.
My writing time is split about half and half between sitting at my desktop, using Word, and using my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard so I can write from my sofa or propped up in bed. I've got particular things that I can only write from the sofa/bed (sex scenes) and particular things that I generally need to write at the desktop (big action scenes that require referring to lots of notes, floorplans and Lego figures) and everything else is down to where I happen to be most comfortable that day.
Weirdly, I find that I get more words down on the page when I'm working on my iPad because I feel less distracted. You'd think it would be more distracting, because of all the procrastinating apps, but it's really not.
When I first bought my iPad, I was using Google Docs for my on-the-move writing and transferring the files between my desktop and Google Drive. I prefer to edit in Word because Google's dictionary makes the Word dictionary look almost accurate. It seems to work on a random word system because it frequently highlights real words with red squiggles and refuses to learn they're real. If I'm having to ignore too many random red squiggles I eventually stop seeing them so I edit in Word, where the squiggles are slightly less likely to be on valid words.
Let's not discuss Word's annoyed habit of thinking American and British spellings are equally valid when it's set to British English. No, Word, that's not how spelling works.
I've been using Quickoffice Pro HD on my iPad, in large part because it synced well with Google Docs. And then last year, for about two months, it stopped being able to edit Google Docs. So I bit the bullet and set up DropBox, which is so much easier to manage that I really don't want to go back to Google Docs for writing. And it synced really well with Quickoffice. (I still use Google for odds and ends of temporary non-writing stuff and shared spreadsheets, so I've not got rid of it totally.)
What I didn't know until last night is that Google bought Quickoffice a while ago and they're now decommissioning it. The replacement app will only work with Google Docs, not DropBox. And the old app will stop supporting cloud storage of any kind in the next couple of months. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth.
When I was originally looking for a good word processing app for the iPad, I didn't consider Pages because it didn't synch at all with Google Docs. But now I'm DropBoxing for all my writing and it turns out that importing and exporting to DropBox with Pages is really, really easy. So I guess I'm learning a new app that may actually be a bit more functional than Quickoffice, which had some quirks that used to drive me absolutely batty.
I'll grab the Quickoffice replacement app for working with the Google Docs that I do still use and Pages will now be my main writing/word processing app, with DropBox remaining as my connection to my desktop. It's probably going to take me a couple of days to get used to using a different app, but on first view it looks like it's going to be much easier to sync it all together than I'd feared.
I've also finally got round to setting my iPad back to using British English spellings again :-D That must have got changed when I updated to iOS6 and, uh, it's taken me a year to put it back...
Oops.
