Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

jenson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 693 posts

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#461

Post by bombela »

numpad0 wrote: post #447
bombela wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android it often stutters, the cursor jumps across the characters at random speeds, sometimes it teleports sometimes it moves one character at a time smoothly. When you lift your thumb it often registers as an extra motion in an unexpected direction. And this is on a flagship Google phone. And it only allows left-right motion, not up-down. So even if you know about it. It's more an exercise in frustration than any…

It's not "on Android", it's whichever keyboard came with your phone. On iOS extremely small number of people use non-standard keyboard(it was later allowed), but on Android the keyboard was always an app and there are many.

It's the Google keyboard on a Google phone. Out of the box experience.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#462

Post by jll29 »

Writing/editing worked fine on my Blackberry. It's the people who introduced the glass surface keyboards that are the root of the editing evil.

Cursor keys to edit, a scroll wheel to navigate one's inbox, it was a dream that "they" stole from us with RIM's demise.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#463

Post by bombela »

satvikpendem wrote: post #437
bombela wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android it often stutters, the cursor jumps across the characters at random speeds, sometimes it teleports sometimes it moves one character at a time smoothly. When you lift your thumb it often registers as an extra motion in an unexpected direction. And this is on a flagship Google phone. And it only allows left-right motion, not up-down. So even if you know about it. It's more an exercise in frustration than any…

That's not been my experience on Android, I can go left right up down just fine. I've tried this on SwiftKey keyboard however but I'm sure it's the same in GBoard.

I am using the Google keyboard, android 13, and I cannot go vertical only horizontal.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#464

Post by exhilaration »

cloudking wrote: post #205
scottjenson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually can paste between words but it's hidden (like most things with mobile text editing) You need to place the text cursor between the words carefully, tap the 'teardrop' on the text handle, and that will bring up the menu to paste. (not saying that's good!)

Wow.. TIL you can tap the tear drop, thanks!

Lol, same here, I've been using Android since 2011 and had no idea it was trappable

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#465

Post by n8cpdx »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #458

People produce less text with more errors in more time on mobile. I actively avoid having to type anything on mobile. If I have my laptop open, I'll use whatsapp or signal on that. I often wait replying on either of those until I get my laptop. Just way less frustrating to not have to correct >25% of my key presses. If I have to use the mobile keyboard, I'll often just send a message with typos, no capitals, and skip…

I don’t think stylus is the answer on phone for text input. Maybe on a phablet. I haven’t experienced it being better and only use pencil on my iPad when in a meeting where typing or using a laptop would be obnoxious.

The Apple Pencil doesn’t work on the phones. But even if it did, it would be ridiculous and un-Apple given that the pencil is disproportionately huge compared to the phone itself. I personally wish they would do something for the rare customer who does need it (e.g. for precise drawing on the go). But they’d need a separate Apple Pencil Mini product.

I think Apple’s answer is that you should use speech-to-text or just serve voice messages, both seem quite popular with the crowd that isn’t on HN.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#466

Post by Izkata »

verve_rat wrote: post #440
satvikpendem wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold down the space bar and you can move the cursor wherever you want, also on Android. I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.

How is anyone supposed to discover that?

At least for SwiftKey, it's one of the settings you can enable/disable.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#467

Post by n8cpdx »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #257

This is absolutely a problem, but I'm not convinced the author has found a solution. I'd have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky. I believe touch screens are fundamentally a bad interface for productivity. Consider the range of actions provided by a mouse: You can hover without clicking, you can left click, or you can right click, all with nearly pixel-level precision. Add i…

3D touch solves some problems for touch interfaces, but sadly Apple killed it (everywhere except Magic Trackpad, for some reason).

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#468

Post by Nition »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #459
Nition wrote: post #398

> We saw this in our user testing when users tried to place the text cursor accurately: they would miss by a few characters... One small thing: I don't know how it works on Android, but I used to have an N9 and then the Jolla phone and you could tap anywhere in text to place the cursor there. iOS doesn't let you, except confusingly on the very first tap that activates the cursor. For subsequent taps, you can tap exac…

You know what was great about text selection on the N9? When you dragged the cursor, you got that haptic tick-tick-tick for each character the cursor passed over. I'll admit I don't entirely understand why this was so beneficial, but somehow it made it substantially easier to get the cursor to the right spot.

Yeah man, everything about the N9 merged hardware and software well. Like the curved glass and smooth edges going along with the edge swipe interaction.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#469

Post by mrob »

tomjen3 wrote: post #319
mrob wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think they are also great for photo viewing, because they are easy to show to others. As the saying goes the best camera you have is the one you have with you. Same reason I listed them as the best music players - I don't want to carry around a laptop to hear tunes. And while some audiphiles claim that they can hear a difference, I have never seen evidence that this is the case.

If you EQ your headphones, e.g. to match the Harman curve[0] to better replicate the sound of loudspeakers in a moderately treated room, you'll probably find they need a lot of bass boost. This means you have to turn everything down to avoid clipping, which hurts the signal to noise ratio. If you only listen to low dynamic range music you still might not notice it, but for high dynamic range music, like orchestral music with natural sounding mastering, you will probably be able to hear noise from low quality DACs in the quiet parts.

Fortunately, good DACs are cheap now, e.g. the Apple USB to 3.5mm adapter [1].

[0] https://headphonesaddict.com/harman-curve/

[1] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#470

Post by functoid »

Pamar wrote: post #387
functoid wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it. It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward. Being completely undiscoverable doesn’t help. Maybe we need something like the old thinkpad nub on touchscreen keyboards.

It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward. Actually I just discovered the spacebar trick thanks to the parent comment and... I can move up and down in a block of text by using the same method. Maybe I don't understand what you mean?

You can move the cursor up maybe 10 lines from where you start before going off the edge of the keyboard.

Now try moving down 10 lines from where you start. Hopefully you will see the issue with starting from the spacebar at the bottom edge of the screen.

Post reply on HN