Blogging with Wacom Bamboo Special Edition

I bought a Wacom tablet last month. This is the first blog post I try to write with it in English. (I've tried that in Chinese.) It's nice to write instead of type, though it needs some training.

Writing in English on Windows 7 requires little training. The initial accuracy is not bad. In contrast, Snow Leopard couldn't recognize my handwriting at all. Experience of writing on Windows 7 is smooth. I can write in my way, which doesn't look good, and Windows 7 can recognize most of them. With some training, Windows 7 can do it better. Less correction is needed after writing several training sentences. And the correction works in a smart way. Windows 7 can remember what you have written even after you inserted them to the editing area, and it provides meaningful options if you want to correct a word. Space will be inserted if needed during correcting and editing. Windows 7 knows what words and sentences are.

Writing in Chinese doesn't include many features in English counterpart. You can't write freely on the baseline. You have to write one Chinese character in one box, and write them one by one. Correction is based on character instead of word. The good news is Windows 7 knows Chinese words and it recognizes Chinese characters by seeing it as part of a word. Snow Leopard doesn't supports Chinese recognition at all. I can only wish they do a better job with Lion.

See My Posterous

I haven't updated this blog for a year. I just don't have enough incentive to write in English. iPhone gave me the incentive to write in English as Chinese input method on it doesn't fit its smooth experience. And Posterous gave me the platform.

It seems Apple doesn't pay much attention to iOS input methods. Chinese input method on iOS doesn't have any intelligence like its counterpart in English. There is no guessing on correction based on dictionary or statistics model. No matter what you type, iOS just pretends that you won't hit an adjacent key. But the fact is you can't avoid making mistakes while typing in such a tiny keyboard. So the process is really frustrating. You need to keep correcting minor mistakes and that interrupts you flow of writing. That's the reason l avoid typing Chinese on my iPhone.

Since I switched to Mac, I tried to find a substitute for Windows Live Writer and then started using MarsEdit. MarsEdit isn't as friendly as Windows Live Writer, but I can have a better control over the source code. Then I started looking for a blogging client for my iPhone and couldn't find any in 2 years. Then Posterous's official client came out last month and I'm impressed by its design and philosophy.

Blogging on a mobile phone shouldn't be too serious. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time within this small screen adjusting details, so the blogging process should be easy. Posterous has made it so easy to blog on your iPhone. Write some text, add some attachments, and then click "Send". No rich text editing, no photo arrangement, its as easy as writing an email within the built-in Mail app. In fact, sending an email from your iPhone was the recommended way for posting to Posterous prior to the release of the Posterous app.

So I started blogging on Posterous in English since last month. Here is the address: http://posterous.catchen.me. It's updated several times a week and I recommend you subscribing to it.