I thought I had sent this post yesterday from my iPad, but Google and Apple don't play nicely together. See the note at the end of the post.
Here are my two lovely assistants at my book signing event: my boys, Nicolas and Evan. This is my second post today from Gaia Java in Stittsville, so I'm going to use a different approach this time.
How is the signing going, you ask? (Yes, I can hear you — there's an App for that). There's a little lull now, but I had a small crowd up to about a half-hour ago. Some friends dropped in, had some coffee, talked about books and kids and cars. I spoke to a couple of readers and gave away some copies of my short story, Sam, the Strawb Part.
It's thrilling to be autographing copies of your book — I have never felt like that before. Now, the crowds have died away; I'm waiting for the next rush to come, the people who need their afternoon coffee. Maybe I'll meet some more readers. I won't hope for more sales — I've had more than most authors get in one day at this kind of event. But I won't turn them down, either.
The technological side
The last post, I wrote the text in a word processor, then copied and pasted it into Google's Blogger app. I could also add a picture or two, taken with my iPad2. That part worked fairly well, although the resolution is not great because of the iPad2's (the "old" iPad, now) rudimentary camera.The Blogger app is not very good. It's designed for use on a phone, and the iPad version does not use the whole screen — just a little rectangle in the middle. There isn't enough room to see much of what you write. The onscreen keyboard — well, let's just say that it's a good thing I have the Kensington Bluetooth keyboard synced to the iPad.
This time, I'm using the old-fashioned approach of emailing the post to my Blogger account. It takes more planning, because you cannot attach a picture to the email from within the iPad. If you want a picture, you have to open it in Photos, select Email Picture, and add the post as a caption.
Enough for now. I'll be here for another hour, so as the celebs on all the talk shows say, if you're in town, come and see me.
One last technological note:
Live blogging from the iPad has a number of holes in it. I tried, twice, to send this post from my iPad. Doing that requires a double work-around.First, for remomte blogging, Blogger requires that you set up a special email account in Blogger; type your text into the email, put the title as the Subject line, and email it to this special address, and the content goes to your Drafts folder. Then you can edit it.
However, on Safari on the iPad, you cannot select a photo from the camera roll or anywhere else in the iPad. So if you want to put a picture, you have to use the second work-around, this one imposed by Apple: select the photo in the Photos app, select E-mail Photo, address it to your Blogger account and add your text in the body of the email below the picture. This does not give you the option to format the picture in any way, however. I suppose if you had a Picasa account, you could include the photo in your blog by selecting its URL, but you can't do that with Photostream, because Apple likes to keep those URLs secret.
So there, two work arounds, but in this case, they didn't work. I thought I had updated the blog yesterday afternoon, but no — all I got, instead of a new post, was a single photo in the Drafts folder. I have had to edit it in HTML mode in Safari on my iPad, because for some reason, I cannot add text in the Compose mode.
Here's a recommendation to Google and Apple: play nicely together.
Sent from my iPad, then finalized on my desktop.
