The article doesn't mention two great features on iOS:
- Move cursor by tap-and-hold on soace bar
- tap-tap for word selection and tap-tap-tap for sentence selection.
I use these two constantly
Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
301–310 of 693 posts
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#3021000% 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…
I generally agree and also disagree with a few aspects of both your comment and the OP. First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a pain. I can do it if I’m away from a computer and have to, but I don’t enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of concentration. As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pr…
I have been using this sine iphone 6/3d touch era and it is ok, but has gotten worse.
1. The space bar is a much smaller target than the original whole keyboard and I often find myself needing multiple press drags.
2. Something changed recently and it is harder to hit your placement target in text especially in single line inputs. When this happens your cursor ends up back where it was or at the start of the line. It is particularly difficult to edit or select a url in the safari menu bar.
Note: I used the space bar cursor placement at least 5 times writing this. It would have been much more difficult without.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s just not your typical consumer. My only disagreement. I think many people don't know they want something better because they've never used something better. The video in the link describes how the users do short texts to get around the problem [0], including deleting whole blocks of text instead of editing. Teenagers, parents, and many others communicate heavily through texts and are often "up and down" like m…
I miss my Blackberry for typing. The tactile feedback of real keys was so much better than haptic screens.
The way cursor movement by touch was implemented on BB10 Wwas also the best I've ever used on mobile. Some kind of adaptive zoom and tap to move by one position.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreeing and amplifying: Taking a random search result, the Canon EOS R5 has a 45 MP sensor: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/eos-r5?color=Black&type=New > Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 Giga bit (128 MB) per image , or ~1,000 images on 128 GB storage. Dedicated cameras have removable storage and professional photographers will carry multiple 500 GB -- 1 TB+ storage cards, swapping them out through a shoot. I'l…
>Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 GB per image 1Gb, not GB. And in practice it's not that high. Most digital cameras use a Bayer filter, with the pixel count specified as the number of grayscale pixels behind the individual filter elements. Raws are most often 12 or 14 bits per pixel, so about 68MB or 79MB for a 45MP sensor. This can be further reduced with lossless compression. Still a lot for a 128GiB phone, th…
Gah! Thanks, corrected above.
Thanks for the additional detail, I'd wondered about the bpp and individual colour-sensing elements.
Point remains that RAW images are large.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#305Emacs on termux from a Logitech K780 works great for me, the benefits of not being mouse dependent pay off in life more often than you might expect. Almost all the "editor" apps (foss only app user here) are subpar compared to using emacs/vim. Web apps are obviously the "in-between" without much of a solution. Also, I do miss my Blackberry KeyOne sometimes and have heavily considered some of the newer physical keyboard phones.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though in fairness to awinter-py, given that text entry is a simpler task than text editing , if typing support is already insufficient, editing won't be any better. I'm typing this at a hardware keyboard on a desktop computer. I've had to make multiple short edits, mostly backspace/retype, as I enter this short comment. The fact that I can look at the screen rather than have my attention focused on the keyboard is i…
yes 100% to your link in my experience all screen input has high cognitive workload (even taps , because modern touch UX has small targets and unpredictable animation timing when you open a menu) US navy blamed touch input for a boat collision and swapped out some touchscreens for physical controls
I find I almost always prefer using a stylus to a finger. That's the Onyx's pencil (previously as Staedler, unfortunately since broken). I can see what I'm tapping on with the stylus, positioning is far more precise, and it doesn't smudge the screen.
It's still hell for text editing, however.
Unless I'm doing actual handwritten note-taking, which might be another option.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s just not your typical consumer. My only disagreement. I think many people don't know they want something better because they've never used something better. The video in the link describes how the users do short texts to get around the problem [0], including deleting whole blocks of text instead of editing. Teenagers, parents, and many others communicate heavily through texts and are often "up and down" like m…
I miss my Blackberry for typing. The tactile feedback of real keys was so much better than haptic screens.
Remember T9? I haven't much experience with it—I'm young. But it was a much more pleasant experience than the current experience with touch screen. Swiping works, but I feel it requires too much cognitive energy. As soon as a conversation is taking longer than this paragraph, I tend to call the person instead.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#308This bit is no longer entirely accurate:
> For highly proficient users, this gets even worse as their is no command key equivalents for cut, copy, or paste. […] Part of the unspoken reason desktop clipboard use is so high is the speed in which it can be used. Mobile has none of this.
I recently discovered [1] that iOS has several three-finger pinch/swipe gestures for copy, paste, cut, undo, and redo. Apparently these gestures were introduced in 2019/iOS 13 [2]. While they are certainly not the easiest gestures to reliably perform, they at least do not suffer from the issues of ambiguity described by the author.
[1]: accidentally, of course, because the discoverability of many features on mobile is quite poor
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/12/gestures-undo-ios-iphone-ipad...
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately this affordance isn’t available when trying to make a selection in noneditable text. Since often on mobile devices I am responding to comment threads (in slack or gitlab or Jira, or indeed right now on HN, for example) the challenges I have in copy-pasting are often in grabbing text from a prior comment to quote, rather than in selecting my own text.
To be fair you can't drop a caret (the edit cursor) into non-editable text in most desktop applications as well. And that's a missed opportunity there too. I think Chrome got less agreesive in changing your selection to match word bounaries, but it was very annyone for a while. I think you could void it by holding Shift, but that had some other side-effects in some pages.
I think internet explorer did this selection thing at one point years ago. I don’t recall chrome doing it. Firefox used to have a ‘caret browsing’ feature but people didn’t use it so it was eventually removed. So I don’t really think it’s a missed opportunity so much as a feature people didn’t sufficiently love.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#310The fact the iOS delete button moves at snails pace then suddenly jumps to deleting words for about 4 words then suddenly starts deleting whole chunks of text. It’s objectively trash and a nightmare to use when just ramping up single character delete speed alone would be an improvement.
This is before we get into the silliness of autocorrect repeatedly autocorrecting the same thing when you delete it and retype it.
Dread writing on mobile.