Roadrunner Twice

Well I already posted about it on the one community where anyone's likely to give a damn, but I built a thing that'll stand up a working Dreamwidth dev instance on your laptop for you. Fill out the config file, vagrant up and answer "1" to its question, go into energy saver and tell your computer to not go to sleep for a while, and literally go out to lunch or something (installing perl modules is way slow for some damn reason), and you should have yourself a Fukken Livejournal when you get back.

The instructions on the wiki were honestly pretty dece, but there is no way in hell I was going to do that all manually. You never wanna be in a situation where if the shitbox VM goes down it takes part of your brain with it.

Why was I even doing this? Well, all the CSS offroading I did in my most recent journal style refresh taught me how to fix at least two or three of the top five (imo) most obnoxious pieces of Dreamwidth mobile jank. I've already got PRs in to fix two of them:

• Quick-reply form trashes the layout on mobile
• Massive trollface blowout on the create-entry page

...and across the two of them, I kind of snuck in a fix for another real stinker, where mobile Safari zooms the viewport to unusable hugeness as soon as you focus a form field. Maybe someone'll ask me to rebase that into a separate thing, idk.

Anyway, I feel powerful. 💪🏼

So I grabbed a new iPad text editor to play with! It’s called iaWriter, and you might have heard of it, since apparently it’s the one Stephen Fry uses or something. I like it a lot. It can’t replace PlainText, because its syncing and organizing are kind of barely sufficient (verging on crappy); it’s completely unusable for making frequent updates to a blizzard of smallish documents, and appears to be meant for working diligently on four or five large files, which will occasionally be switched out. It’s a text drafter, I think, not a text editor. Anyway, the upshot is that I seem to be able to write fiction with it at speed, which is one hell of a feature and which I always found too frustrating to keep trying for on Simplenote and PlainText.

The two real standout touches are that it uses a big ugly font that’s very readable no matter how I’m holding the device, and it extends the iPad keyboard with a row of extra keys – things like always-on apostrophe and quote keys, and cursor keys that can navigate by letter or word. It sounds trivial, but it ends up making a pretty huge difference, and I’m inclined to attribute its surprising usefulness to the amount of friction that takes away. I realize most iPad apps can’t do that with the keyboard, because it makes it take up like 3/5 of the whole screen, but it’s damn nice if you need to type for an hour.

It also has two standout annoyances: there’s a big old scrolling dead zone on either edge of the page, and it doesn’t switch the keys back after you type an apostrophe with the normal punctuation keyboard. Yes, you have a built-in key for that, but that’s no reason to punish me for picking up a little muscle memory elsewhere, geez.

I think I paid like a buck for it? It’s definitely worth checking out, even if you already have a main text editor.

(Oh, and apropos of nothing, apparently it saves newly created files as Little-Endian UTF-16. Who in the world uses that for ANYTHING? Weird!)