Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
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Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#2- Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile"
- Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer practical
- "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward."
Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile" is pioneering is bad.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#3- Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile" - Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer practical - "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward." Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile" is pioneering is bad.
Like the linked article says,
> Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption
... and will always be consumption devices.
A television isn't a substitute for your laptop either.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#4At the end of the article the author seems resigned and that it seems impossible to bring this to the end user. I don't understand why? Why can't this be a keyboard that I can switch to, like I'm able to switch from Samsung keyboard to Google keyboard? Or like an accessibility app?
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#5At the end of the article the author seems resigned and that it seems impossible to bring this to the end user. I don't understand why? Why can't this be a keyboard that I can switch to, like I'm able to switch from Samsung keyboard to Google keyboard? Or like an accessibility app?
Because the text editing process is baked in the base UI classes on Android (TextView), you cannot change it with an app. OEM manufacturers sometimes do because they ship different class code with their OS.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#6The author made a demo app, surely this could be evolved into a library? I could give an option to users of my app to switch all text inputs to use this instead of the system's default.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#7Please fix this. I mainly use my phone to write hn comments and it is already too much pressure on the current state of the typing experience for me. I could imagine myself doing all sorts of support and maintenance jobs from my phone if only I could interact better with code on it.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#8My 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.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#9At the end of the article the author seems resigned and that it seems impossible to bring this to the end user. I don't understand why? Why can't this be a keyboard that I can switch to, like I'm able to switch from Samsung keyboard to Google keyboard? Or like an accessibility app?
Because the text editing process is baked in the base UI classes on Android (TextView), you cannot change it with an app. OEM manufacturers sometimes do because they ship different class code with their OS.
But the author works at Google, so can surely pass the message on up the chain that this design decision is stifling innovation in touch-based text editing?
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#10I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from the middle of words, I think that’s fine. It seems pretty important to have the tests be realistic or their results won’t relate much to the real world.
It is possible to connect a keyboard to a phone though obviously this is a bit silly. But it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience. And iPhones tried being better at text editing and apple dropped those changes, so it does seem they at least didn’t feel the change was worth it:
- you used to be able to select a word and pressing shift would toggle the suggested correction between regular, capitalised, and uppercase. That feature was dropped
- with the pressure-sensitivity feature, you could press on the keyboard to turn it into a kind of touch-pad for moving the cursor, this meant your finger didn’t get in the way of the text so you could see where the cursor was going. You could press harder to begin a word-by-word selection then move to select more or press harder to upgrade to sentence/paragraph selection. Apple got rid of the pressure-sensitive screens in newer phones and give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection (as far as I know) and makes it hard to move the cursor down.