Aleh Cherp at the Macademic has a post on how he uses tags and folders with file management. I’m still figuring this out myself but Aleh’s idea of tags for reference files and folders for project files is very similar to the way I’ve been using Mavericks tags. As an aside, the Macademic is a great site and completely worth your RSS subscription.

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As part of my little Automator screencast I did earlier this week, I used a special symbol in the file name. The character viewer opened during the screencast and I received several emails/tweets asking about how I did that.

A lot of people don’t even realize the character viewer is a thing. You can activate it in the Keyboard Preferences by ticking the “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar” box and the character viewer icons shows up.

Clicking Show Character Viewer opens a screen we’ve  had for some time in OS X that lets you pick among the various symbols not otherwise easily accessible.

Starting with Mavericks, Apple made this even easier. You can open a slightly friendlier (more iOS-y) character viewer with the key combination Control-Command-Space.

On the heels of yesterday’s post about alternative text selection, how about alternative keyboards? Where this type of utility was verboten on iOS for so long, Apple appears to no longer have a problem. The early leader for alternative keyboards is Fleksy (App Store)(website). I downloaded it and found it interesting but not so mind-blowing that I’d put all my text in their app exclusively.

Now Fleksy has opened up their SDK for anyone on iOS. The mechanic lets you start using the Fleksy keyboard once you activate the copy and paste pop-up selections. I’m curious how long the selection of that keyboard will “stick” after the users decides to start using it. If it reverts to the standard keyboard when you close the app, I think they are in trouble. If Apple really wanted to embrace alternative keyboards, they’d need to make it a preference. Don’t hold your breath on that one.

Regardless, I’m curious to see how much traction this gets. If forced to handicap it, I think this will be one of those edgy nerd-things. However the ability to use colors and themes may be enough to draw in the muggles.

The Thoughts 2 developer had an interesting idea for text selection. Specifically, he put right and left arrows on the text selection points that allow more fine-tuned selection. They’ve got a clever little video showing off the feature. I bet there are some pretty big fights inside Apple when they decide how fiddly to get with these controls.

Chris Brogan bought a Dell tablet and things went downhill from there. I’ve been out of the PC market for years now. Hasn’t anyone on the Windows side tried the Apple model of customer service? They should.

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Last week Dr. Drang lamented the inability to share a Numbers template between Mac and iOS. He then very cleverly showed where the Mac iWork template files are buried and how to get them onto iOS. This is a problem I’ve struggled with for years. Not only does iWork not sync templates between iOS and the Mac, it also doesn’t sync templates between two Macs. If you create a template on Pages on your MacBook, you’re not going to find it on Pages on your iMac.

When I first heard about Apple’s re-invention of the iWork suite, I hoped that this would be one of those itches that Apple could scratch with a unified code base for the iWork apps on all platforms. It was one of the first things I tested. Unfortunately, no luck.

Apple isn’t alone in this problem. I have the same issue with just about every other productivity app I use among my various Macs and iThingies. A few years ago I had a catastrophic drive failure. With all my various backups schemes I recovered all of my data. I thought I was a real Grade-A super-nerd. I was so impressed with this data recovery that a few months later I nuked my final SuperDuper clone of the wrecked hard drive and moved on. The very next day (Next Day!) I had call for a Numbers template that I created on that machine and never managed to migrate anywhere else. I opened Numbers, looked at the blank template list and thought to myself, “whoops”.

So this pesky template problem led to the first data loss I’ve experienced in a long time. Because this problem persists, I’ve come up with a much less clever solution than the good Doctor’s. I added a Templates folder to Dropbox. In there I’ve got a series of subfolders related to the various productivity apps I use and every time I create a document that I want to keep as a template, I save a copy there. Over the past few years, these folders have grown and I’ve got a nice little bank of templates I can access from any device.

You may be thinking that a similar solution could be accomplished (with the iWork suite at least) by creating a document folder called Templates and saving a documents to this impostor. That’s true but I prefer keeping them on Dropbox to save iCloud space and not junk up iCloud directories that are already not very friendly to high numbers of documents.

I still save templates to the iWork suite and certain of my other productivity apps but I also always make a copy into the Dropbox bank. If you are concerned about security, you could also save the directory to a Transporter. (I’m actually planning to make that move myself.) Because the iWork suite is now so closely related on each of the platforms, I suspect Apple does have template syncing on a white board somewhere in Cupertino and it will eventually show up. Even though, I still plan on keeping this folder. The iWork apps aren’t the only ones I’m saving templates from and there is something comforting about having your own set of backups. Just in case.

I keep threatening to stop writing about this story but some part of me can’t resist. Last week Microsoft’s chief of marketing explained how there were a lot of reasons to keep Office off the iPad. Then days later, Mary Jo Foley reported we could see Office on the iPad by July.

How many times must this carousel go around? Clearly there are warring factions at Microsoft. Putting Office on the iPad means a lot of money (or more likely Office 365 subscriptions) but Office ubiquity also makes their own platform (like the Surface) less special.

For years now, we’ve all been wondering if Microsoft will put Office on the iPad. While there is a version of Office for the iPhone, it still is missing on iPad. If Office does find its way to the iPad, I don’t expect it to have all the bells and whistles that Office has on Windows or the Mac (or even the Surface). In fact, I’d expect it to be feature limited. That is the compromise that would let the anti-iPad wing Microsoft finally capitulate. “Make it for the iPad, but don’t make it as good.” This isn’t without precedent. That appears to be the tack they used with Office Mobile for iPhone. I suspect that if/when Office does make it to the iPad, it won’t be that impressive and we’ll all wonder why we spent so much time on this merry-go-round to begin with.