NoStylus News – iPad and iPhone updates

Blogging from the iPad

My back had been making for a few hours and I really needed to go and lie in the bed, but I still wanted to do a couple of things. I often have my iPad with me when I go to bed to have a little bit of a checkup on Twitter or my email. Last night I decided to use the application Blogsy to post some blog posts I had already written using the application Drafts. The application Blogsy has a bit of a strange interface sometimes and I needed to remind myself about how things worked. I was able to get to the HTML part of the interface where I could paste in the HTML code I got from Drafts. I didn’t write it in HTML code, I wrote it in markdown and exported it out as HTML. If you haven’t used markdown yet, then I suggest you give it a try.

So I pasted in the text of the blog post and then I added a picture. I already had some pictures in my camera roll in Photos that I was able to grab and to put into the post. You do a double tap on the picture to bring up the dialogue box to adjust how you want the picture to display. I wanted to set it so that it centred upon the page and I also added some alt text and a title. I was very pleased with the way that it all worked and I was able to do what I wanted to do very quickly indeed. I am certainly looking forward to getting my hands on a new iPad in October to go with my new iPhone 6.

Adding more applications to my iPad and iPhone

I have added quite a few new applications to both my iPad and the iPhone lately. This is because there have been one or two offers that I have seen that have been too good to miss. I added Comic Life which is a handy little graphics application for making comic book images. So far I have had just a little bit of a chance to play with it and I am tempted to use it to make the front cover for my soon-to-be published book. I also added an application called MyFitnessPal. I have been losing weight since February and I have been using an application called Noom on Android. You record food input and also exercise you take. Noom is also available on iOS, but I had heard good reports of this other application, so I thought I would give it a try. I have also bought Tweetbot for the iPhone as it is the one that I have been using on my iPad. I bought the version for the Mac too and so I will have the same experience on all my devices.

I have recently become a Grandad and my grandson is half Estonian. He will be speaking Estonian with his mother and so I have decided to learn some Estonian too. I found a dictionary application for translation from English to Estonian. I also found a couple of applications for learning the language. I think my daughter-in-law will be quite surprised when she hears me speak some of these words. I don’t plan to tell her beforehand and so it is going to be a little bit more of a shock.

Getting used to iOS 8

There are quite a few new things with the new operating system that I like. There are widgets that I can get in the notifications area. One such widget is the one from Yahoo Weather and it looks great in the Today area of notifications. There is also the Day One widget which gives me a graph showing the days that I have posted a journal post. It also shows a couple of random photos from the journal. The other widget that I have added so far is from the application Clear which I use as my fast to do tool. I do have OmniFocus on my iPad, but having a quick list making tool is very handy. There are plenty of other new things with iOS 8 that I’m still working out how to use. I will write about those as I find out about them.