2009-07-05
On Taking Notes
Yesterday’s note on Ephemerality was a bit of an experiment. During the day at OpenTech, I’d not really been taking notes, but I had posted a few observations to Twitter. For the talk by Gavin Bell, I thought I’d try to type notes directly into the official iPhone Tumblr app.
This was my longest experience with typing on an iPhone or iPod touch, and I think I could get better with practice, but I wouldn’t enjoy learning. Looking back, I’m not sure the piece holds together well, and that might be because I still find editing hard: moving the insertion point via touch and the loupe effect seem far more fiddly than the combination of cursor keys and Emacs keystrokes available on the desktop.
It’s also hard to insert links into a piece composed on the iPhone; task switching is of course more painful than it is on a (admittedly more powerful) full-size computer. I really felt this when I was trying to keep up. It also makes the finished report far less useful.
In summary, I think the utility of getting the text up on the web live, especially from an iPhone, is far lower than I’d anticipated, and that in future I’ll stick to taking notes on paper. If I did ever want to try and liveblog an event, in the way Jeremy Keith does so well, I’d have to use a full laptop, since then I’d have the space to edit, streamline and add links to a post.
