www.nofluke.com

Yesterday I discovered another app that dispels the myth that the iPad is only for consuming information, not creating anything.

Textastic is a wonderful text editor that provides code highlighting and hinting for more than 80 languages. Its interface is well thought-out, the best feature being a row of keys above the standard iOS keyboard that each give tap-and-swipe access to five commonly used characters for coding. It’s very quick and simple to use. I hope Apple incorporate something like it in a future version of iOS.

It also has a floating widget that replicates a standard keyboard’s arrow keys and makes text selection much easier.

Textastic provides access to (S)FTP and WebDAV servers and, very usefully for me, Dropbox. This site is Tumblr, but all my CSS and JS are hosted in my Dropbox, so I can make changes anywhere via my iPad.

At £6.99 it’s dear for an iOS app, but cheap for such a well thought-out, powerful text editor.

While I hesitate to say it. I definitely work better under pressure. And there’s no greater pressure than starting and finishing a project in just two days.

That’s what a Hack Day is, and they’re great fun. You really bond with your team and the results can be extremely impressive. David Burton (@phishtitz), Redweb’s Head of Innovation, describes his first.

I found out today that I’ll be involved in my third Hack Day soon and I can’t wait.

So the new iPad’s official name is ‘the new iPad’. I wonder what will happen next year when there’s a new iPad which will presumably, also be called new. Will this year’s be the old iPad? Or the old new iPad.

If Apple are trying to take naming this device down the route they’ve taken for years with their Macs, it’ll be the iPad (early 2012). Why this is better than ‘iPad 3’ hasn’t occurred to me yet.

Apple seems to attract speculation like no other tech company. I’m not sure whether this is because they’re so secretive about their upcoming products or in spite of it.

Analysts and bloggers generally have very little to go on when it comes to filling their pages with ‘insight’, so often resort to patents, blurry shots of cases and so forth to extrapolate the future. That’s the best case scenario. At worst they trot out personal wish lists of varying likelihood, which their readers then hang on to as being the gospel truth.

All this time Apple themselves say nothing, so the speculation takes on a life, and credibility of its own. The blogosphere whips itself up into a frenzy of unrealistic anticipation such, no matter what Apple actually announce, is greeted with disappointment.

The iPad 3 has been little different. Apparently it’s going to have Siri, NFC, USB ports (as if) and a double resolution display.

Actually, that last one is different. Nobody is denying that the new iPad will get a retina display. All bets are off. Even Apple’s invite to their March 7 event (“We have something you really have to see”) strongly hints at it.

I guess it could be that the iPad 3 gets an AMOLED display, rather than retina, but that would be a massive surprise.

No, this time if the rumours aren’t true it would be a real disappointment rather than a manufactured one.

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