I still lament the effective death of physical phone keyboards, but it’s decided by the users already, apparently. The new generation got used to be typing on the screen and don’t even know what they are missing.
Same with gaming: the gamepad with horrible accuracy that mandates autoaim and limited number of buttons became standard. I can’t do fathom it, but people who grew up gamepads see no issue.
Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
151–160 of 693 posts
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#152Nothing 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.
If slide-out keyboards were still a thing they wouldn't be nearly as bad but we had to get rid of those because being thinner is the most important thing in the world
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t this still exist? You Force Touch the space bar and get a cursor
If I'm remembering correctly the main difference is that it was fast -- the space bar cursor is fine but I do feel like I lost something that made my input on mobile better. Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder. Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait. iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
When in an input field, you simply tap to place the cursor. If you need finer placement you use the spacebar. The tap works 90% of the time since you’re usually editing whole words.
Also, iOS has kept a software implementation of force touch around, even after removing the hardware: a hard press goes directly into cursor placement, it takes a bit more force than it used to. I imagine it’s a mix of gyroscopes and detecting a growing touch surface.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Holy crap. I've been using the space bar for years to move the cursor, I had no idea you could select with it too. Thank you!
It's even officially documented as well [1]. I wonder if selection was introduced when the spacebar cursor was, or if it was later.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscree...
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#155I 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.
I dunno, Samsung's default keyboard already has am implementation of modal editing, which was loved by most of it's users that I knew.
Not in the same way as vim, but you could hit a hot key to switch your keyboard to a navigation/select/copy+paste mode.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#156My 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.
I don't know about IPhone but on Android its simply impossible to Paste text between two words. You can't paste text into cursor position you can only replace selected text with Pasted text. Thats my main biggest issue. Also, why the fuck there no Copy/Paste buttons on mobile keyboard??
There are copy/paste buttons on Gboard, but they're kind of hidden. Press the 4 squares in the top left of the keyboard and select Text Editing. You get arrow keys, a button for toggling select, and cut/copy/paste. In a way it's like switching out of insert mode in vim.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#1571000% 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…
> before you say “sounds like you just want a tablet” One of my friends uses a GPD Pocket 3, which is an 8-inch computer that's small enough to fit in your pocket, with a full keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen that swivels to become a tablet. It's pretty nifty. https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
Although they used the 'Pocket' brand for the Pocket 3, it is really a GPD MicroPC 2. The original MicroPC was 6 inches and is an even better candidate for "phone sized laptop". The crazy thing is that it's perfectly usable and much more productive than a phone - if it could make phone calls and had the same sensor suite as a smartphone, it would be superior along every axis.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#158Maybe we just need a speech-to-text interface.
Like in the old days, with voice-recorders.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#159Nothing 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.
You can buy quad core x86 "laptops" - real computers - the size of a phone. How much more "on the go" do you need?
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#1601000% 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…
The moment I opened the article and started reading an idea came to me before reaching the authors solution. Imagine if you could just double tap a word and suddenly it becomes focused and enlargened while slightly blurring the rest of the text. The word in question now has easily targetable tap targets that you can modify quickly, swipe up to delete, rearrange, select etc like a sliding puzzle game. Like everyone I've had the same problem but in a majority of the cases its to fix something that the phone suggested or accidentally added to the directory that I can't easily remove (thanks ios) and nothing overly complex.