You Need a Keyboard

It's a Post PC world, and we're just living in it. But for now, you still need a keyboard.

Steve Jobs told us that PCs are the new trucks, and tablets are the new cars. We all need a car — assuming we can't simply rely on public transit (hmm, could smartphones be the new public transit?) — but most of us don't need a truck. Oh, you might want a truck when you're at Ikea and feel like a fool having to stuff oversized boxes into your subcompact car, but you don't really need one. Or if you do, you simply couldn't get by with just a car. Case closed.

With computers, though, the case isn't exactly closed. Actually, turn that around: it's far from closed. Our smartphones are more powerful than the computers that took mankind to the moon, and yet most of us couldn't do a full day's work from an iPhone. At the very least, we wouldn't be very productive. And even on a tablet, you'd likely be hard pressed to get a day's work done, no matter how basic your computer job is.

Own just a car, and you can still get around perfectly fine — and even buy smaller furniture and just about anything else. Own just an iPad, though, and you'll feel technologically crippled.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Actually, all you need to add is a keyboard, and your tablet will be a lot closer to a computer substitute, just smaller and lighter.

Hello from 1868.

The keyboard is an odd part of life. Pencils and pens, even paintbrushes and markers, are simple enough that practically any early human civilization could have though of them. Keyboards, though, are a decidedly modern invention. The Qwerty keyboard we know (but may or may not love) was patented in 1868 by one Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and, in his own way, tech entrepreneur. Smithsonian Magazine dug into the history of the Qwerty keyboard layout and Sholes' work, and found that it was due to both a deal to license the patent to Remington (the company today known as a gun manufacturer) for its typewriters, and due to the way telegraph operators used keyboards, that the layout became standard.

Thanks to the original short message service, and industrial age standards development processes, the Qwerty keyboard layout graces everything from now-antique typewriters to the on-screen keyboard in the latest smartphones. We may have switched to touchscreens, but we're still typing the same way we have for the past century and a half.

But that's not the power of the keyboard I'm talking about. Sure, being able to type letters and numbers and symbols on the iPad is important — but you don't need anything extra for that. What's needed, though, is the extra function keys we know and love from Mac and PC keyboards, and the extra features they can unlock on your iPad.

See, iOS is at its core essentially a lite version of OS X. And all the keyboard shortcuts you're used to using when editing text on a Mac are still baked into the OS. There's just no way to access most of them from your on-screen keyboard. You can long-tap on a key to get alternate versions of the letter or symbol, which is nice, but there's no way to select text, one word at a time, or jump to the top of a page, or insert an Apple icon, or add a non-breaking space character to your document. The iOS onscreen keyboard is best-in-class — I've written thousands of words on it — but it'll never rival a full keyboard unless it gets function keys. For that and more, you need an external keyboard.

The Power of a Keyboard

You'll need to get a keyboard to see what I'm meaning. There's a lot of options, from keyboard cases to an existing bluetooth powered keyboard you may have laying around. Any would work, but I suggest the Apple Wireless Keyboard, which at $69 is neither the cheapest or the most expensive option. But, it's a great keyboard in its own right, is light on batteries, and has all the functions you need to make your iPad into a nearly full computer.

Now, pair it with your iPad — or iPhone, if you don't mind working on a small screen — and open a new document in Pages (still unrivaled as the most powerful traditional word processor on the iPad). If you don't have it, open your favorite text editor app, or even the default Notes app. Type a few paragraphs — you'll likely type noticeably faster than you do on-screen — and try moving around through your text. Nice, right? Your iPad likely feels more powerful already.

Ok. Time to do more. Try selecting text (for those unused to editing text on OS X: hold shift while using your arrow keys, press alt as well to select text a word at a time, or press command at the same time to select to the end of the line, or the top/bottom of the page). Use CMD+C/X/V to copy/cut/paste text, or CMD+B/I to make text bold or italicized. You can even add in special characters with the same keyboard shortcuts you would on a Mac, so if you're learning to use better typography from Matthew Butterick's new book, you'll be able to insert non-breaking spaces and em dashes and more from your iPad. You'll suddenly find that there's no reason to fire up a computer for word processing anymore.

That's not all. Notice the tab key on your keyboard? That still works on your iPad. You can tab through online forms — or cells in Numbers spreadsheets — just like you would on a computer. Sure, it's not quite as useful since you can't CMD+tab between apps, or CMD+Q to quit an app, or use Spotlight to launch an app without touching the screen, but you can do far more with an external keyboard than you can without.

I used to use an iPad 1 as my full travel computer, working a full day of tech support and editing and email on the go. I could do it just from the on-screen keyboard — and multitasking gestures — but it'd be tiring. With a wireless keyboard, though, there's little left to miss from the Mac experience.

Now if there was just a way to install new fonts systemwide — or even in all individual apps, or perhaps just in Pages — on the iPad. Someday, perhaps. Someday.

Update: As it turns out, there is a way to install fonts systemwide in iOS 7. That was still months away, though, when this article was first written.

Originally published on July 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 3

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