531–540 of 693 posts
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Yes! -- I'm curious if you had some efficient way to find that?
Front page of HN (or any story page), search box at bottom of page. Enter “gcanyon iOS”. Click on “Stories” and change it to “Comments”. Click on “Popularity” and change it to “Date”. (Actually I first entered “gcanyon iOS business”, but did not find it.)
Thanks! TIL
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…
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 find that typing on a phone (iPhone or Android) these days is substantially easier than typing on an iPad because of swipe. It's still nowhere as efficient as a keyboard in the hands of a skilled typist, but I can often produce text fast enough that it isn't worth getting out my laptop. On an iPad it's far worse, because I actually do have to use the bad QWERTY touchscreen key-by-key. What I keep hoping for as far…
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 mean yes, of course, but how could it be otherwise? A desktop keyboard is 10x the size of an entire mobile phone. The idea that it should somehow be possible to attain the typing performance provided by such a large dedicated input device on a phone the size of a keyboard's space bar is pretty ridiculous.
And I'm unconvinced that the "Eloquent" design presented in the article is a step forward. The "T-Menu" looks terrible and confusing, and I find the drag animations quite jarring.
The only obvious, intuitive mobile interface for text entry is speech-to-text. I know it isn't quite there yet, but that doesn't mean fiddling with details of how cursor movement works on a phone screen has any realistic chance of ever solving the problem.
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You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did not have to wait for the long press to register.
Unfortunately this affordance isn’t available when trying to make a selection in noneditable text. Since often on mobile devices I am responding to comment threads (in slack or gitlab or Jira, or indeed right now on HN, for example) the challenges I have in copy-pasting are often in grabbing text from a prior comment to quote, rather than in selecting my own text.
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…
For a somewhat similar implementation (touchscreen is essentially handled as touchpad) look at how Teamviewer handles remote sessions to Windows desktop from smartphones.
I would really like any/all of those as a toggle-on mode for use on Android itself... selecting text with arthritis fingers is a pain – literally and figuratively.
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"A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse " Not quite. A touchscreen can detect many fingers, that can do many gestures. The problem is, exept zooming (pinching with 2 fingers) and moving around (swiping with 2 fingers) the potential is pretty much unused.
It's a good point, but I'm not sure how to use those gestures for text entry. TFA didn't go down the multi-touch route either in their proposal. But it's possible I'm not being creative enough!
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"A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse " Not quite. A touchscreen can detect many fingers, that can do many gestures. The problem is, exept zooming (pinching with 2 fingers) and moving around (swiping with 2 fingers) the potential is pretty much unused.
It's a good point, but I'm not sure how to use those gestures for text entry. TFA didn't go down the multi-touch route either in their proposal. But it's possible I'm not being creative enough!
First, (iOS perspective but it’s not that different than Android) to convert the suggestions row to a row of function keys anytime Shift was held down. No annoying delays or extra taps waiting for the menu pop-up. So now you can use two fingers to cut copy paste undo instead of using several seconds and a popup that can appear anywhere onscreen. Next, arrow keys. Heck, use the same Shift hack and, when Shifted, replace the space bar and the dead useless area below it with a big inverted T. Our phones have gotten much bigger and yet especially on iOS the keyboard hasn’t grown a pixel since what, iOS 5? Case in point: no number row still for Apple, even as an option. Wtf.
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3D touch solves some problems for touch interfaces, but sadly Apple killed it (everywhere except Magic Trackpad, for some reason).
It never worked though. It would just pop in randomly at unexpected times. It sucked.
My 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.
I don't know about IPhone but on Android its simply impossible to Paste text between two words. You can't paste text into cursor position you can only replace selected text with Pasted text. Thats my main biggest issue. Also, why the fuck there no Copy/Paste buttons on mobile keyboard??