SCRITTO AL FRESCO

Dick Pountain (24/06/1999 3:02pm): Idealog 59
                 
I'm writing this column sitting under a magnificent copper beech tree in the West Meadow at the Kenwood Estate in North London, with tall summer grass all around and even a foxglove in the corner of my vision. You might not find this any big deal - after all mobile computers have been around for a long time - but it has taken me personally twenty years to achieve this feat, and I've only achieved it now thanks to my Palm Pilot and a neat little add-on keyboard called the GoType, whose purchase price was the best £70 I've spent in a long time. 

I've owned many, many pocket computers (indeed still have some of them) from the Sharp PC-1500 of 1981, through the cute Epson PX-8, up to the Psion Series 3 and 5. They all lacked something - a good enough keyboard, a big enough display, enough memory - sufficient to prevent me forcing myself to write a full article on them. Before you say anything, yes I do own a laptop, a nice clean 1998-model Compaq with 32 Mbytes of RAM, a CD-ROM drive and all my usual Windows 95 software installed. However every attempt to use it to work outdoors has fallen foul of three unpleasant facts. For one, it's way, way too heavy to carry without finding it a constant nuisance. For two, the contrast of its colour screen is not good enough to read comfortably on a sunny day (precisely the days when you want to work outdoors). For three, its battery life is poor (and worse, highly unpredictable) so that if you use the CD-ROM drive much you are lucky to get two hours out of it.

Paradoxically the poor little black-and-white screen on my Pilot Professional is perfect for working outdoors as it actually looks its best in full sunlight. The Pilot's battery life is about two months so that is not a consideration at all. The GoType keyboard is just large enough to touch type on comfortably - about 50% larger than that on the Psion Series 5 and comparable with the Libretto or larger Windows CE machines. It folds up flat enough to fit neatly in my shoulder bag, along with my Sony Discman and a few choice CDs, without noticing the extra weight, and it doesn't need any batteries. When you slot the Pilot into the cradle on the GoType the whole assembly has a curious sci-fi/baroque appearance - like something out of Flash Gordon or the first series of Star Trek rather than The Matrix - but that really doesn't worry me at all.

The Pilot software is absolutely minimal, but that doesn't worry me either:  I now use SmartDoc, which has no more fancy editing features than the Memo Pad, but can handle larger documents (as big as the Pilot's memory will hold, which in my case is 2 megs). You might think I'd miss all the trappings of a grown-up word processor such as Word, but I've never written this column in Word anyway. I write using a plain ASCII programmer's editor called Ultraedit which has no fancy fonts or formatting features at all. The truth is that when writing original copy for publication you are not in the least concerned about formatting, which the production department will sort out later (thanks Rachel, thanks Keith), and all you are concerned with is thinking up the words, then getting them on the screen as fast as possible. Business people writing letters to impress other people are the ones who need to worry about fonts and indents and letter-heads and such, and it's for them that modern word processors are designed. If I need to do any of that stuff, I just import my ASCII file into Word, which takes about a second, and tart it up there, and the time I save typing in the ASCII editor (by not having to, for example, constantly battle against 'IntelliSense' trying to rewrite my copy) more than repays that second.  

In fact the only things I do miss are my special macros (on which I'm now totally dependent) that cause Alt-Leftarrow and Alt-Rightarrow to drag the character under the cursor one place to the left or right, while Shift-Alt-Leftarrow and Shift-Alt-Rightarrow drag the word under the cursor, so allowing me to correct all the most common typing errors with single keystrokes. I haven't found a decent macro interpreter for the Pilot yet, and I'm not nearly proficient enough at OS-level Pilot programming to write one myself, which is a real pity. The Pilot's Shortcut feature is invaluable in many ways, but it can't do stuff like moving characters around. Fortunately the GoType has a dedicated Command key (as well as Shortcut and Done keys) so that cutting and pasting with Command-X and Command-P are made simple enough, easier than in Grafitti.

Talking of which, does my purchase of GoType mean that I've lost faith in the Grafitti system which I've praised here so often before? On the contrary, Grafitti is still perfectly appropriate for taking quick notes, adding to the address book and jotting appointments, for the everyday stuff when the Pilot is kept in my inside pocket. I don't carry the GoType around with me everywhere, just when I want to write a serious length article. The great thing is that I have the choice, to take keyboard and screen apart and pocket just the latter, which is not possible for Psion, or Jornada or Libretto users. Chalk up an all-too-rare win for a new technology.