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Thumb-key takes a radical approach, and I've watched someone who has become comptetent at it (which i haven't) type elegantly on it.
https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
But I always wonder why noone has tried building a hardware chord keyboard for a phone. It seems perfectly suited.
It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or handles.
I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-di...
Edit: fixed link
I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch devices. It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices. Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb typing on a screen. Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on letter based inference…
1) I use the arrows in my keyboard to move the cursor. (Or letters in vi) Consider four new buttons to be able to move around once the cursor is active.
2) Love this concept. Editing this very post is too hard. This is a big change. Put together the progressive UI that adopts these changes over time. Do the research on user adoption and least impact. Move this from idealist end state, to practical sequence of steps to get there.
In other news, I typed this on my phone, having to edit parts of it, and failing to simply drag my cursor to the end!
I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch devices. It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices. Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb typing on a screen. Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on letter based inference…
modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart phone user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the text editing process is baked in the base UI classes on Android (TextView), you cannot change it with an app. OEM manufacturers sometimes do because they ship different class code with their OS.
But the author works at Google, so can surely pass the message on up the chain that this design decision is stifling innovation in touch-based text editing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart phone user.
There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning Solidwork…