I wish Steve Jobs could read this

(I posted this at my website today)

Nobody from Apple reads my web site - I can't say that with absolute certainty, but I don't see any apple.com in my logs - though somebody could be reading by RSS.

If I could be granted one magic wish for today, it would be for Steve Jobs to read this one short post.

The clumsiest thing about the iPad is cut and paste. The next worst thing is the on-screen keyboard, and both of these are easy to fix.

Three things to do before releasing iPad 4.0:

Add a Paste button to the keyboard

This alone would save me much aggravation. A simple thing, but oh so useful.

Have a Paste stack

Look at Pastebot - you just take that, make every selection go into it and when the keyboard Paste key is hit, up that pops. That would be beautiful.

Add a custom keyboard

Look at Quick Word. I use that to store HTML tags, which are otherwise painful to enter.

Add a top row keyboard slider like they do - which would also let you take out the .?123 key because those keyboards would be choices.

And for crying out loud, would you let us put in arrow keys, command, control, escape and whatever else we want? You don't know what we want to type - let us fully control that. I use my iPad for ssh, RDP and Webex sessions; I need those keys sometimes. Even if I just VNC to my own Mac, I need keys that are not there.

Just these three easy things. That's all I want.

becarefull of what you wish for ..for you just might get that wish at times..

Send steve an email, he has been responding to a significant amount

You know what they say, you can wish in one hand and **** in the other and see which one fills up first.

If I had an iPad in 1692 I would have been burned as a witch.

People really do not get the idea how iPad is such a helpful device. Its even magical! I think a lot of people are discontented about everything. They keep in finding flaws about something.. Too Bad..

Internet was probably really slow in 1692...would be pointless!

Believe me, I love it. It *is* magical. And Apple is great at designung interfaces that work very, very well. But that doesn't mean that they get everything right the first time. I (and I am sure many other iPad owners) work a lot with text and also use ssh, rep, vnc and Webex frequently - more flexibility and secretion in keyboards and better paradigms for text manipulation only make a wonderful machine that much better.

LOL Recharging too ...
Aluminum did not exist then, you would have been accused of being an alchemist.

I don't use those things but why wouldn't those apps use their own keyboards? Perhaps blame the apps as opposed to blaming Apple for not providing something most people don't need.

The keyboards aren't huge to begin with, the more keys they have, the smaller each key is, or more real estate is used for the keyboard. Neither of those are solutions I want. These are designed for the masses, not the small minority of people who use certain apps.

Blaming?

Who is blaming?

Look, I understand that there area bunch of morons out there jumping all over the iPad and maybe that makes people overly sensitive. But suggesting a way in which something could be made better isn't "blaming" anyone for anything.

Was OS X a great OS when they had tcsh as the default shell? Probably for a lot of Apple folks it didn't matter and still doesn't because they never use Terminal. But this of us who do use it regularly knew that Apple had made a mistake, and we told Apple that the default should be Bash. Apple listened, and changed it.

A lot of us will be using vnc, rdp, Webex and ssh. We need better keyboards and so will many other apps - it makes sense for Apple to do that.

A lot of us work regularly with text - writers, web designers and others. We need better paradigms for text manipulation. None of that casts any blame, and implementing any or all of it won't change a thing for those who do not need these improvements.

If I had my one and only wish from Steve Jobs, much less from any other program developer, it would be a Microsoft Streets version for Apple and iPad. Call it iSreets or something, just do it..... I think this is the one peogram I miss the most since coming to the Apple world...

You are calling out Steve Jobs to do create a standard keyboard that most people will not use. As I said, the apps can use their own keyboards, write them. As I also said, I personally don't want keys that are useless to me (and probably most) taking up real estate on the screen or decreasing the size of the existing keys. I have used an iPhone for years now and I have never needed any of those keys. I can certainly understand that there are people who do, which is why I suggest you write the app developers, not Steve.

And I disagree that it won't change things for those who don't need it. Yet again, where do you think those keys will go? If it is done at the app level, you are absolutely correct, it won't impact those that don't need it, but given that your request was to Steve Jobs, it's obviously you want it at the OS level where it absolutely will impact all of us.

I don't know much about Streets but there are plenty of GPS driving apps. What does streets do that others don't?

-Numb

how do you find his email address? I have a couple questions I'd like to ask actually.

sjobs@apple.com

Let us know if you are the one in a million he replies to .

Ok, I get it now: you are all ticked off because you think my idea would cost screen real estate.

It wouldn't. You have two .?123 keys now; if one of them called up a third keyboard that was programmable, you'd lose no space.

Using one of the keys that way could even be an option in Settings - which would mean no change at all for those who don't need other keys.

In fact, that's probably the best way to do it - add optional keyboards in Settings.