Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Documents on my Phone

It seems that every week I am writing more and more. Not only am I doing more writing overall, but I am doing a larger portion of it from my phone. I started back into writing at around the same time as I acquired my Pre. It took me a couple of months though to realize just how much I can do on this device.

When I (re)started my first blog (I had started it a couple years ago but had neglected it for the past year or so) I did all my writing at the library. I started doing email on my Pre right away, but not blogging. This was mainly due to the nature of the essays I was writing. I would do a fair bit of research which meant lots of cut and paste (especially the dictionary definitions and quotes) which even today with what I've learned and the apps I've acquired it is still too much hassle to want to do on the phone very often. I also used to put allot of links into my essays, links with separate mouse-over text, and where words in the essay were hyperlinked. I still have yet to figure out how to build those kinds of links in my essays from my phone. 

Google docs has long been my primary resource for writing. Since I haven't had my own computer for a few years now, I definitely needed a cloud-based solution. No matter where I was when I logged in, I could always access my work. I have really grown to love the resources available through my google account. It's a good thing Android was still so unstable back in April or I would never have stumbled upon webOS (seeing as how I loved all things Google).

After a month or two of extensive email correspondence through my phone, it started to occur to me that I could write more than just emali on this thing. At first I just needed a way to take my rough notes from my Pre and get them on a real computer where I could polish them up and then upload them into Blogspot. I also wanted a way to take some of my rough essays from Google Docs and edit or add to them on my phone. Knowing I could write on my phone any time I wanted was quite liberating. Not that I immediately took advantage of this newfound freedom as fully as I could have, but I'm getting into the swing of things now...

My first solution was to keep using what was already working. Which was the email app on my phone, and Google Docs on browsers. I would copy the document I wanted to work on from Docs into my Drafts folder in gmail. I would do this by selecting and copying the text to the clipboard and then pasting it into a new email, and then saving that email in Drafts. Or vice versa for transferring an essay out of my phone into Docs for polishing and publishing.

At this point it also occurred to me that perhaps this entire process could be made easier by something in the app catalogue. Which is when I finally started to learn what a smartphone is all about, especially one running webOS....

... to be continued




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