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Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

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Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#341

Post by mabbo »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #76
mabbo wrote: post #62

When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were consistently asking for updates. I made a website called "is stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal website there. It was literally just route53 and cloudfront in front of an S3 bucket. But that meant I needed to make updates from the hospital with my phone. I mean yes there were probably better options but I was a bit busy at the time to think of them…

This is the kind of stuff you read on 4chan as memes about orange site. While going through all that you decided to create a website of all things and update it by hand editing html. Normal people, and I hate saying that, would create a facebook/WhatsApp group or something like that. I'm not making fun of you or anything, not everyone has the same lives, I'm just amazed by the hn crowd.

I'm not disagreeing with you. This was a very bad idea.

But I was a few hours away from becoming a parent, hadn't slept much in days, and was not thinking very well.

Sub-optimal decisions were made.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#342

Post by msh »

skydhash wrote: post #307
happymellon wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

I tried t9 when I in the name of simplicity went for a Nokia candy bar. It was utter shit. I think it only worked because there was no good alternatives back then.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#343

Post by n_ary »

Off-topic: I want to murder the person who removed the beautiful magnifying glass in iOS when manually dragging a text and replaced it with some garbage mini reticle that often bugs out and disappears if I am dragging on multi-line text >:(

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#344

Post by n_ary »

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.

> but they really are terrible computers

except for bottom-of-the-barrel androids, most drcent smartphones cost equivalent to a decent computer. I refuse to accept the garbage UX on an equivalent device which charges me such money and then dumb it down with tracking and ad shenanigans over usefulness.

P.S. My own opinion and it is very OK to 150% disagree with me.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#345

Post by knodi »

Someone1234 wrote: post #187
screye wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say purchase a folding phone. It's great.

It doesn't address this editing issue at all. It somewhat attempts to address multi-tasking, but this thread is specifically about how poor the text editing experience is, and I'd like to hear how a folding phone fixes that? I have an iPad and even there without a mouse plugged in, the editing experience is poor.

Shocker! touch is not the best at complex and precise input. But it’s great for general purpose use and buttons. Problem is we all at some point in our day, week, month need to do something complex on the touch device, which becomes a challenging task and experience.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#346

Post by LegitShady »

iainmerrick wrote: post #326

Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares [...long and detailed description of the problems and how their research attempts to solve them...] Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging. What a strange attitude to take! What’s the point of the research if it’s not aimed at shipping anything? Hopefully this is just a miscommunication a…

>What’s the point of the research if it’s not aimed at shipping anything?

research!

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#347

Post by hollandheese »

skydhash wrote: post #307
happymellon wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

T9 was so terrible I didn't use text messaging until I got my first iPhone.

Actual Keyboard >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Touch screen typing >>>>>>> T9

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#348

Post by CalRobert »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #203
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…

> 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 desperately miss my HTC touch Pro two and its slider keyboard. It was a dream.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#349

Post by jchw »

The vast difference in editing things on a MicroPC with its touchpad and physical keyboard versus a phone is immense. I'm pretty sure I can legitimately type faster and usually navigate UIs faster on a capacitive touch phone, but the frustration of typing and targeting the cursor is unbelievable even after having used smartphones for over a decade now. It's just bad.

It is amusing that it's hard to convince people this is a problem, but I sort-of understand. Over time people have learned to just, not edit text on mobile. There's relatively powerful versions of office suites on modern mobile OSes, certainly more powerful than Windows CE devices that had full keyboards would ever ship with, and yet most people don't even really consider doing much on mobile other than sending messages and taking notes, two things that rarely require dragging the cursor. When editing things you quickly type out, gestures like dragging the spacebar to move the cursor around is usually "good enough" for making small edits to fix typos or change the wording, which makes it feel like a non-issue.

On Pinephone with Squeekboard, I greatly miss the ability to drag on the spacebar to move text, and even slightly miss the ability to swipe across keys to type. And yet, the weird thing is, even though text editing on Phosh is significantly less refined than either Android or iOS... I ultimately don't have much harder of a time doing it. And I think that speaks volumes on its own.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#350

Post by alepar »

Not invisible for me. I do occassinally enter moderate amounts of text 3-4 paragraphs). I also like to iterate on my texts, so I do a lot of editing and entering at the same time.

The points mentioned in the article are painful, but something I could get adjusted to and get better at with time. There are a couple of things for me though, that I just can't work around, and which are subsequently the biggest pain points for me. These are: lack of vertical space in landscape mode and broken text selection feature. Let me elaborate. Note that I own a google pixel phone, so can't really speak for iphones or androids from other companies.

Pixels gravitate towards long and narrow displays. This can be great for portrait mode, but sucks for landscape most of the time. The issue is made so much worse that neither OS or most apps seem to try to optimize for this mode, further wasting the space available. For example, I'm typing this post in Firefox on my phone right now. About 1/3rd of the screen is taken up by the keyboard. This is fine and is actually the reason I use landscape mode - bigger keyboard allows for faster typing. Another 1/3rd however is taken up by a combination of notification bar at the top, gesture hint bar at the bottom and firefox's address bar. With some manipulation you can make the adress bar go away, but the other two bars can not be hidden on pixels period. Perhaps the biggest frustration is the fact that the "fullscreen" mode I want is already implemented on Android for games and such, there's just no way to turn it on for firefox in either the app itself or the OS.

Text selection tends to be broken when selecting several paragraphs of text, especially when selecting existing text from a web page - the teardrop just jumps around violently not letting you to put it where you want it. Sometimes you can wrestle it with multiple attempts, but other times it just won't let you leaving you with the only workaround of selecting in smaller blocks.

This reminds me there actually was one somewhat recent improvement to text editing on androids from few years back: ability to move cursor by sliding your finger over the space bar. That eliminated one big pain point I used to have.

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