Screenshot, Copy, New from Clipboard in Preview.app, Tools -> Text Selection, select your text. Hack the planet.
Awesome! Much appreciated bro.
And yet... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAsh47yWwAAxU1m?format=jpg&name=...
Just let me select text
421–430 of 621 posts
Re: Just let me select text
#422God I absolutely abhor "UI takeovers":
Not allowing text selection, disabling scrolling where there should be scrolling, disabling autocomplete/text substitutions, or corrupting the Back/Forward buttons...
Websites are guilty of this more often than apps, which usually just do whatever the device OS allows.
Even worse are the outright LIES that even Apple has been guilty of for a while now:
• Refreshing a webpage doesn't really refresh it. (it's less fresh than entering the URL in a new tab/window)
• Going back doesn't really go back. (It loads the URL again..absolutely disgusting on YouTube when you want to go back to an interesting thumbnail you noticed too late, but it's not there anymore)
• Force-quitting an app doesn't really quit it. (Now iOS still gives them a noticeable bit of time to ponder which is annoying when you open that app again right away)
Not to mention the outright privacy and security violations like textboxes that send keystrokes home.
Re: Just let me select text
#423I must admit, one of my favorite recent-ish Android[1] features is that all text is made selectable in the app switcher using on-device OCR. Regardless of the app[2], you can just swipe up and start selecting text. [1] ...at least on the Google Pixel. [2] ...unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for screenshots and similar things.
On iOS you can create a shortcut to push a screenshot through the built in OCR and copy to clipboard. You need to crop beforehand if you don’t want all the text on the screen. https://imgur.com/a/NctIGsK
On recent iOS versions it just happens. You try to click on an image in the browser to save it and whoops! you're clicking on text in the image that iOS already OCRed for you. And the Photos app will let you search for OCRed text, and it OCRs _all_ the text without you having to lift a finger.
Re: Just let me select text
#424By far the stupidest version of this to me has been Snowflake’s implementation of previews. This is a database, where people preview the content of a table, not in an app, not on a phone, and someone thought it was a good idea to make that an image. I have no idea who ever thought this was a good idea, but here i am constantly tricked into thinking I can select some preview data, only to realise I have to go on a 10 clicks and a SQl query diversion to get it done.
Re: Just let me select text
#425I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes i…
> I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. "There are dozens of us!"
me too!
Re: Just let me select text
#426I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes i…
Totally agreed. I’m often compulsively highlighting things too, and I often get caught in clickable areas. We need proper text content, not this.
Re: Just let me select text
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't selectable because it breaks the UX for keyboard-only users. Has nothing to do with "thinking" anything. It's about testing with accessibility parameters and knowing* what practical problems occur. If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. You're bringing edge-case hypotheticals to a discussion about practical functionality.
> If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. I'm confident that I can type just a tiny fraction of all Latin characters all world languages use. I'm sure that pretty much any Vietnamese word is way beyond my keyboard layout. No clue about writing any non-Latin script. Can you type any Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, Abjad, …, character you see?
There are also a bunch of characters in other languages that look identical or almost-identical to ASCII characters. It’s very difficult to tell the difference with the naked eye.
Re: Just let me select text
#428Re: Just let me select text
#429As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text. Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions). But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should , prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back a…
Accidential drags are can be detected an prevented in JS, which is imho the best solution.
Re: Just let me select text
#430Dude 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.
Accessibility though...