Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#141

Post by thewarrior » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 2:53 PM UTC

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…

This is where speech to text models like Whisper and LLMs can make a real difference.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#142

Post by the__alchemist » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

Even ripping the keyboard off my surface to save space etc, it feels crippling unless I'm watching or reading something passively.

To a lesser extend, using a trackpad vice mouse. Or a controller in FPS games.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#143

Post by awinter-py » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is a huge attention suck and kills my input speed

On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words

Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain

while we're griping:

- on an older android device the built-in keyboard is such a pig that it sometimes requires you to slow down to like 1 character per second. Note that this worked fine on a nexus 5 with aosp a million years ago, so it's not like it's not a solved problem

- Swipe keyboard is in theory good, but the keyboard can't switch from swipe tap smoothly enough and usually causes an error

- droid has the ability to drag inside the spacebar to move the cursor, but the first time you do this, it inserts a word instead because it's confused about what mode it's in

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#144

Post by bee_rider » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

You can install blink shell, panic prompt, or whatever the popular iPhone ssh client of the day is and ssh over to your desktop to get a preview of how this would work.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it is fine IMO. The screen is a little bit small. Sometimes if I’m going to SSH from my phone, I’ll put the phone on a little stand in front of the keyboard, so it can sit more like a foot from my face, or whatever (normal cellphone usage distance). Or, I’ll put it in portrait mode farther away and think of it as “half a screen.”

Either way works fine for short stints. Nebulous concerns about eyeball heath for long sessions, although I have no real evidence to back that up, and we’re all screwed on that front anyway, right?

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#145

Post by guestbest » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

I wonder what text editor apps are excellent examples of efficient mobile text editing. Does anyone know?

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#146

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #141

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…

This is where speech to text models like Whisper and LLMs can make a real difference.

No -- those are for typing. This is about editing. Totally different things.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#147

Post by nameless_me » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99

superkuh wrote: post #49

Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.

One of the most important watersheds in my career, was reading Jenson's The Simplicity Shift [0], many moons ago. It was written pre-iPhone, and talked about the brutal necessity of reducing mobile UX to the very barest essentials. I find that I am revisiting a lot of this stuff, when writing Apple Watch apps. [0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads the entire booklet as a PDF)

Thank you for sharing this work. I look forward to reading it.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#148

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

scottjenson wrote: post #131

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most important watersheds in my career, was reading Jenson's The Simplicity Shift [0], many moons ago. It was written pre-iPhone, and talked about the brutal necessity of reducing mobile UX to the very barest essentials. I find that I am revisiting a lot of this stuff, when writing Apple Watch apps. [0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads the entire booklet as a PDF)

This is a lovely thing to read on a Sunday morning, thank you!

No, thank YOU!

[EDIT] And, since I have you on the horn, There seems to be a PDF error, where the first page (The Challenge) is repeated twice.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#149

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #49

Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.

> Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.

Which is literally extremely frequent, since we often need to do stuff on the go. Which is why an article like this is so important -- we should improve, not give up. There's no reason to think text editing on a phone has reached its final form.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#150

Post by bee_rider » Sun, Sep 24, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

genter wrote: post #33

troupe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be fewer desktops, but laptops work the same way and they don't seem to be going away any time soon. I'm not aware of "tons of professional writers, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing" who spend most of their writing time on the type of mobile devices described in this article.

I'm not saying they are now. I'm saying they will in the future.

I really doubt people are every going to give up big stand-alone monitors.

Putting cellphones on big standalone monitors might work. But in that case, we’ll probably also need to attach a pointing device and some way of entering text, so from a UI point of view, we’ve got a desktop.

Cellphones definitely have sufficient processing power for lots of typical office workloads nowadays… but using them in this way doesn’t seem to have caught on.

I dunno, eventually this sort of discussion ends up at “why didn’t DeX take over the world,” a question for which I have no good answers, since, like everyone else, I never tried it out.