Interesting thoughts from Craig Grannell on a TechCrunch post about the future of writing in a keyboard-less world. One thing that grabbed me was this sentence from Grannell:

>Like with every other creative medium, it’s the edit that’s so often important with the written (or spoken) word.

Like most people, I talk differently that I write. To be specific: when I talk I formulate my thoughts on the fly, but when I type I am forced to think about what I ultimately want to say and how to get there. So the idea of dictating to my Mac was never something that I wanted, it certainly is something nice to have, but I never use it.

However, on my iPhone, I seek out the dictation. It is simply much easier to dictate on my iPhone than it is to tap things out with my thumbs. Because of that, I tend to steer clear of my iPhone for anything long form.

Which brings me to software keyboards and my odd love and fascination with them. Specifically the iPad software keyboard. Because of the, shall we say, clunkiness of typing on the iPad’s software keyboard I have found that you must type a bit slower to be more accurate (editing is a pain). And because of the slower rate of typing, I find that I transcribe my thoughts a bit more clearly.

This, I think, is why I like using the iPad so much — having nothing to do with the one-app-at-a-time viewports — instead more accurately getting my thoughts out of my head. Ideally, then, I would love to have a writing device that is the iPad, but with width to accommodate a full-sized software keyboard — I may be the only one who wants such a device though.