The post implied the opposite. However, if the German girl writes in German, probably she wants to date in German, the dating platform follows her wish by making it hard to extract the text, translate it, and eventually waste her time.
This is not at all the point of un-selecatable text development. I don't even want to ask how you came to this example. Every day this forum becomes more like reddit.
Like with all things Google, this feature wasn't available in Gemini (or only available on some devices) last I checked. With Gemini going to replace Google Assistant in the future, this is yet another useful feature that Google will be taking away from Android.
If you open an image with Google Lens (or select the image in the Google Search app, which seems to result in the same thing) Google does by default an image web search and shows you similar pictures, but it also displays a blue "translate" button on the right, which activates OCR and text selection, and optional translation. Though it doesn't seem possible to avoid it doing the image web search first, which might be…
That's a very different flow with a much higher friction compared to simply long pressing the home button in any app.
Dude is right, most of this non-selectable web can be served as images from a back-end. We have both the server power and network to do it, perhaps is going to be in many cases be faster than all the React/Angular slop on top of simple UIs in 2025.
On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.
yeah definitely my favourite feature on android too that I use multiple times per day. Unlike the people saying taking a screenshot is basically the same on iOS - no it isn't. This moves the whole display into an ephemeral screenshot and you can copy text, translate, all kinds of things, without the delay of taking a screenshot, or worrying about that file hanging around permanently after.
Super ironic that often images are the most accessible way to share text data these days but that's what enshittification brought us.
Given that this page has the following styles which aren't applied anywhere else on the blog: body { -webkit-user-select: none; -webkit-touch-callout: none; -moz-user-select: none; -ms-user-select: none; user-select: none; } I think it's safe to assume that being unable to select text on this page is not unintentional, as several comments here assume, nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how annoyin…
I don't know why so many comments are discussing "if it's intentional troll or hypocrisy", when it takes 10 seconds to check one of the other blog posts and see if the text there is selectable :(
Because people don't understand what a joke is sometimes, even on that's obvious like this.
Any plain old TextView on iOS and Android has text selection disabled by default. As a developer, you need to make it selectable explicitly. Apparently Apple and Google want it that way.
It's always bothered me that links on webpages are single click to open. They should require double clicking to open (like just about everything else on a computer) and single click should be used to start selecting text, like everywhere else on a computer.
When you run an app from the taskbar or start menu, you single-click on the app icon, or single-click on the Start menu button and then single-click on the app. Sure, icons on the desktop, or just about anything in a file/app explorer window, require a double-click by default, because the lineage of the main desktop area is just a file explorer window without the window decorations. I think it might be about stakehol…
You make some good points here. Even in file managers, one can usually highlight with a single click then use either a context menu or a menu at the top of the application to single-click on things like run, move, copy, or rename. I think the idea of making hyperlinks in hypertext more like a menu than like filesystem resources does make some sense, especially since the browser is an application and single-click within user applications has been pretty normal for a long time. Still, I agree it might have been better if this had gone the other way.
Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint generates decent / passable abstract designs for slides ... but you can't then edit the design elements at all. The appear neither on the slide nor on the underlying master slide.
On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.
All text is selectable on the app switcher granted it uses OCR so YMMV