Peter Cohen"I gave 10 participants a simple set of text editing tasks, such as deleting an “x” from a string of characters or moving a word to the end of a sentence. Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard and lots and lots of errors."
Tara@flargh I bet if I asked 10 people to do it on a desktop, the results would be the same. I cringe when looking over peoples’ shoulders at work. Most of the time they backspace to the correction. Like they don’t know there’s arrow keys or a mouse.
Jósean Arroyo
Glenn Fleishman@flargh every time I edit, even this reply, it's a wrestling with UI disaster
Kevin
ChancerubbageAre either of you speaking specifically to the new way iOS 17 is handling autocorrect and predictive text? Because I find the current change an improvement.
I figured you might be throwing a wider net discussing the issues touch screen gestures for editing in general, compared to a physical keyboard and mouse.
@Chancerubbage @glennf The OP's central thesis is that text editing, in general, on touch devices is crap, and I wholly support that. I *want* to edit text and even have a workflow to support it thanks to Ulysses, but it is an exercise in frustration on my iPhone and apparently little better on Android, from what I've gathered here.
Nate Barham@flargh Totally agree that mobile text editing is in a pathetic state considering how long we’ve had iPhone-like devices. However, their Eloquent solution relies on hardware functionality that is not standard on modern devices (the “hard press”).
Unless maybe I misunderstood?
Double-tap drag would be a more universal way to invoke the clipboard actions, wouldn’t it?
Also, I just discovered that you can *already* drag the clipboard menu options on iOS 17. Not sure how long that’s been there!
@flargh And, this whole thing just makes me sad that 3D-touch is gone. 😕
Loved that for dragging/placing the cursor! Even the new “Fast” haptic touch is still way too slow. I get errors with it all the time where it thinks I’m trying to swipe type (three times editing this post).
Matt Birchler@NateBarham @flargh Was gonna say the same thing. Some of these suggestions are repackaging that 3D Touch had on the 6S.
I’d love to see a version of their video with someone actually using the app. It sounded complicated, but maybe that’s just the description.
@NateBarham @flargh Yeah, the video is what I found kinda hard to follow.
Andrew Abernathy@NateBarham @flargh My read was that they didn't require any exotic hardware functionality, just the accelerometer (which is basically everywhere, if I'm not mistaken), but did say that Apple's abandoned 3D touch would have been better.
I didn't know / had long forgotten the edit menu was scrollable but can confirm it is in iOS 16 as well. I think showing a clipped portion of another item would suggest that it's scrollable. But: you can only scroll in "pages", so might as well use the buttons.
Geoffairey
Anders Hovmöller@flargh 3D touch even had selection that worked! No one seems to know though. I used it and I miss it daily onmy modern phone.
Steve Sebban, CSI@flargh I can add that selecting a mix of RTL (Hebrew/arabic) and LTR(Latin/english) words in a sentence is a real tour de force, even on a computer
Bob Peterson