I'm genuinely a bit foxed by yesterday's news about the iPad, and version two coming soon. It was good to see Steve Jobs well enough to make his usual charasmatic public appearance. But the product...

I bought an iPad because I thought I'd be able to use it for revising a manuscript. I can just about manage this using pdf files <a title="Can you really revise a book on your iPad?" href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/01/can-you-really-revise-a-book-on-your-ipad/">as I recount here</a>. But this is marking up passages for revision. Not editing. Fine for big things, but I really ought to be able to change small typos directly as I read if I want.

I don't always feel like doing that. But I would like the option and it's not there with a pdf file. or anything else I've found. Apart from the decidedly mediocre (no full screen viewing, no revision tracking, no comments) cut-down Pages app from Apple itself, nothing on the thing can handle rich text. All the many editors for the thing (at least the ones I've come across) work in plain text only. And books -- mine anyway -- are written in rich text, as Word or rtf files.

So what does Apple announce yesterday? Oh look. You can edit movies on the iPad now. You can also play with Garageband. The music thing I can see. Why anyone would seriously want to edit video on the thing... beyond me.

And rich text? Nothing. In fact Jobs didn't even announce an update to Apple's own word processor Pages, now years old and looking it. Pages is just a short step from being a fine competitor to Word 2010 on Windows, the best general purpose fiction word processor around. It also has to 'compete' on the Mac with Word 2011, a decidedly inferior effort of which Microsoft should be ashamed. A good update would make Pages a killer necessity for Mac-based authors. But no... or at least not yet.

So you can play with video on your new iPad and pretend you're a pop star. But want to type something in italics? You'll struggle.

Plain ridiculous...