escape

I wrote recently about troubles offline blogging from my Nexus 7 in its default state. My Nexus 7 has only intermittent mobile connectivity, no personal accounts, and only one app -- a sideloaded Firefox.

That experience led me to put the Nexus back in a drawer. I upgraded my iPads to iOS 8 this week and set out on a now annual journey of discovery to see if any of the list of things that bug me about iOS have been put to bed.

Here are the top three items on the list:

* Ability to control the camera from Javascript: Nope
* Ability to see escape and control key 'keypress' events from Javascript in Mobile Safari: Nope
* Ability in input a square brace from the virtual keyboard without a sticky keyboard mode change: Nope

With these ongoing omissions, it may be time to put iOS in the drawer for a while. My original complaint with the Nexus had nothing to do with its hardware or even the mechanics of the Android operating system. My complaint was about the utility of the device out-of-the-box.

Out came the Nexus. I paired my Apple Wireless Keyboard with the Nexus to see if Firefox or Chrome on Android would give me the control keys I love. They do.

My next steps were to load Fabrice Bellard's awesome jslinux in Firefox on the Nexus, fire up vi, and write this post. I'm in escape heaven.

I'll get the post out by catting it to the special device /dev/clipboard. If this were 1998, I could use IrDA to beam the text directly to my laptop, then edit and publish. Instead, I'll probably have to push the text to some kind of browser-available shared drive on the network and fish it back out with my laptop.

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In fact, that is exactly what I did. I could have published directly from the Nexus if I were willing to use my blogger credentials on the tablet. My next experiment may be to see if I can pass the text between the tablet and my laptop with bluetooth or NFC. beam.py looks interesting.

Why do I do this? I have a Newton keyboard, a Palm keyboard, a keyboard for my Nokia 770, and keyboards for iOS and Android devices. They were all disappointments. Best Buy has ASUS and Toshiba laptops available for $229. That's cheaper than all iOS devices except the very cheapest iPod touch. It's astonishingly cheap.

I think I keep trying to turn cheap and underpowered gadgets into computers because it still seems familiar. It reminds me of my own path through the 8-bit era. I would probably give it up if I had ever had a Coleco Adam or one of the other ersatz computers actually fashioned from game machines.

I worry that tablets give us a view on the future of the rest of consumer computing. Apple's indifference to my escape key today on iOS could become the Mac view in not too long. Fewer people would notice the difference than noticed the lack of a floppy on the original iMac.

The Macintosh itself didn't have an escape key and wouldn't get one until Apple unified keyboards across the Mac and Apple II product lines in about 1987. Escape wandered off some Mac keyboards in 1990 but found its way into the revered Apple Extended Keyboard.  Escape has stayed with Macs ever since.

Macintosh Plus Extended Keyboard
Photo Courtesy MagicTom

Escape's ongoing place in the celestial firmament is less clear. The Newton never had it. iOS has never supported it. I suspect that Android passes it along only thoughtlessly because it comes along for free from some lower level software. Escape began shrinking on laptop keyboards years ago. On my MacBook Air, escape is about a fifth of the size of Caps Lock.

The cosmos is telling me something. It's telling me to ditch vi or it's telling me to build my own keyboards. I just can't tell which.

(a javascript keyboard tester is here)