Kobo - not quite the thing

Today at 22:19, I received a mail from Kobo, the ebook company. To continue using my Kobo device, I need to make an update before midnight. Today. Less than two hours after the mail reached my inbox.  Otherwise, I will have to find a laptop, a laptop cable, install some new software on the computer and download the update this way.

I try to like Kobo, I really do. I like competition, and alternatives to Amazon Kindle and Apple’s Books are always welcome.

But Kobo keeps failing. My device is unresponsive, and I often have to wait for several seconds after having clicked on a button before anything happens. Their books can be bad OCR scans with plenty of typos. One I just deleted didn’t even begin the first paragraph with a capital letter. The proof reader hadn't even got to the first letter.

I wish Kobo all the best, but unfortunately it is often not worth the pain for the consumer to try to use it.

Writing in Italian or Scandinavian with MS Word for iOS

This post applies if you type in a language with the word “i” in lower case, in other words not English, which uses upper case I to describe “me.” Languages where this post applies are for example Italian, Croatian, Catalan, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

The post applies to the current iOS in February 2019 on both iPhone and iPad, when you use the current version of Microsoft Word for iOS.

The problem is that Word automatically capitalises the letter i to I, even if you use an Italian keyboard layout, Italian spellchecking (Review > Proofing Language) and run your iOS device in Italian (or another language with lower case i as a single word).

There are a few cumbersome things you can do to type i:

• Press i and space, and then step back with the delete key, and type it once more.
• Press i and tap on the I that pops up every time. This solution does not necessarily work if you use a hardware keyboard.
• Press two spaces and tap between them. Press i. Tap anywhere on the screen.
• Type the entire text and accept that every i becomes an I. Then go back and double tap on every I, then type i to replace the text, and then tap somewhere else on the screen each time.

I have sent feedback to Microsoft about this, and if you have the same problem in your favourite language, I suggest you do so too. 

 
i > I