Good blog editor for iPad?

I know I’m not going to be able to to replicate my normal workflow for blog posts on the iPad. This usually consists of taking articles from NetNewsWire, passing them to ecto for editing and then using that to publish to my blog.

But I would like to find a nice blog editor for the iPad. So I could cut and past in something from a newsreader and do the formatting in the editor (i.e. adding links, bold, pictures, etc.) followed by publishing Anything out there that really works?

On my iPad

Writing this on my iPad. Using the WordPress app. Having fun.

My iPad exhausted me

I got my iPad yesterday and spent the evening searching out apps to download and then playing with them. My hands are sore this morning.

First I had to sync it all up.One nice thing was that I could use the iPhone backup to sync, so all my music, iPhone apps, etc. got on in one connection. I also forced it to sync my email settings. Then because I have a MobileMe account, I got my contacts, calendars and emails all synced with no effort.

Then I had way too much fun.

Playing Fur Elise on the Magic Piano was just to much fun, and finger-cramping. I’m a lousy singer, as the Glee app demonstrated. I’m so bad that auto tune could not fix me.

I watched some old Castle episodes on the ABC app. I read the free book on iBooks, Winnie the Pooh, and downloaded a sample of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer. That was cool because this is actually two books – To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat. The sample includes the first 90 pages or so. Time to figure out how to move over ePub versions of things.

Twitterrific is really cool. I love the little tweet sounds it makes when a new item arrives.

Today, besides working to build up my hand strength, I expect to see just how well or poorly the iWorks three work. I’ve heard about some of the problems but I hope I can arrive at a workable solution.

What happens when disseminating information is not the goal?

New York Times article once more rips into the military use of Powerpoint for decision making: when will they ever learn?
[Via Les Posen's Presentation Magic]

One of the slides I showed in my Presentation Magic workshop at Macworld Expo this year has now made it into a Powerpoint critique in a New York Times article, by Elizabeth Bimuller, entitled, “We have met the enemy and he is Powerpoint”. Here’s the featured slide from a war room Pentagon briefing:

Unfortunately, the projector at Macworld didn’t talk nice with my Macbook Pro so those present at the workshop couldn’t make it out too well, but here I think you get the picture. It is but one of several similar mappings in Powerpoint presentations to the US military leadership which the Times article describes thus:

Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No doubt there will be many who will complain, with some justification, that once more Powerpoint is being ripped into as a cause rather than the medium it is… but, as I have long written and demonstrated in my workshops, if it is only the medium, then why are 95% of presentations one sees so similarly disengaging with their overuse of text, bullet points and impenetrable graphics? That number increases to 99% if you randomly download Powerpoint presentations from the web (using any esoteric keyword you like in Google) and add .mil or .gov.

[More]

Most times a slide presentation is used to disperse information to a group. But as mentioned here, hierarchical groups often have a need to prevent rapid flow of information.

Often it is because they have to give a public presentation and do not really want the public to understand. Obfuscation becomes the norm.

As the New York Times article mentions, the goal is to ‘hypnotize the chicken’, making the talk so boring that no one will ask any embarrassing questions.

There are two reasons for really poor presentation performances – ignorance of the right skills and purposeful misuse. It is hard to tell but the more hierarchical the group, the more likely the second reason is operating.