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Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

jenson.org

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Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#121

Post by dihrbtk »

Grimburger wrote: post #106
plaidfuji wrote: post #57

1000% agree with this post, wow. I can’t believe this is controversial.. it’s a disaster. I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list. The problem is the target audience for this is business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market. ICs aren’t up and down as much between meetings and can largely stick to their desktop se…

> business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market Is it really that small? It sounds like a massive market to me.

not in constrast with basically the entire planet (the overall market for smartphones)

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#122

Post by Pxtl »

mrob wrote: post #95
tomjen3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are much, much better for photos. I will even say they are better for most videos chats. They are better music players. They are better GPS nav systems.

They are better for taking photographs simply because they're smaller, but for every other aspect of photo viewing, management, and editing, they are worse. They have a tiny screen, insufficient local storage and compute, and no keyboard or mouse. They're not better music players. Sound quality can be identical because phones support USB DACs, but again, everything else is worse. On a real computer I can easily searc…

> insufficient local storage

My phone has 128gb. How is that not enough for photo editing?

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#123

Post by twic »

TrianguloY wrote: post #42

Maybe it's just me, but when dragging the handler, specially on a selection, it often moves after releasing the finger, it's infuriating.

Same. But I get this on desktop too, with a trackpad. Makes precision selection when image editing very frustrating.

It would be nice if there was a simple and universal way to do this interaction more precisely!

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#125

Post by failuser »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #88
craighay1 wrote: post #14

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…

On an iPhone if you hold the space bar down the whole keyboard becomes a kind of trackpad which you can use to move the cursor. Since all the keys disappear, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select text or paste in a specific spot in that “mode”. Right now it’s so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.

You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did not have to wait for the long press to register.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#127

Post by dredmorbius »

dist-epoch wrote: post #90
plaidfuji wrote: post #57

1000% agree with this post, wow. I can’t believe this is controversial.. it’s a disaster. I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list. The problem is the target audience for this is business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market. ICs aren’t up and down as much between meetings and can largely stick to their desktop se…

Are folding phones a solution for managers?

If they're a clamshell style with a physical keyboard, as with the Psion Series 5, possibly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>

Folding-screen phones are an expensive gimmick, with inevitable exceedingly expensive repairs:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/the-pixel-folds-scre...>

I predict a flop along the lines of 3DTV.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#128

Post by Pxtl »

craighay1 wrote: post #14

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…

In gboard we've already got modal stuff for numerical keypad, emojis, special characters (2 different modal pages), etc.

Adding one more modal keyboard page for cursor-editing (arrow keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, home/end, pgup/godown, select-toggle-button, delete, rclick menu) would just make sense. Would just be getting the rest of the desktop keyboard into the phone keyboard, nothing groundbreaking.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#129

Post by scottjenson »

enragedcacti wrote: post #111

I wonder if there is a way to unboil the frog and introduce features in a backwards compatible way. One way could be to implement some or all of this along with changes to Android's "spacebar drag" cursor movement mode. Currently it can only move left and right unlike Apple's touchpad approach. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like you could implement a lot of the features through a keyboard touchpad while ke…

I'm the author. I agree, this could be a good way to do it. It's what I meant by a "slow burn" in the post. For example, just start with improvements to tapping and dragging, then add a better magnifier, etc. Just getting rid of some of these ambiguous bugs would be helpful.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#130

Post by failuser »

fisian wrote: post #8

My biggest problem in editing on mobile is changing a text selection (for example a long URL or long text paragraphs) that don't fit on screen at once. Once I have to scroll (vertically or, even worse, horizontally) in addition to moving the selection handles the UX is just terrible.

You can long-press spacebar on iOS to get a trackpad-like behavior. And you can tap somewhere else to even select like that. Awkward, but it works.
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