"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."

https://jenson.org/text/

The invisible problem – Scott Jenson

@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).

@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.

@matt @flargh Did you see the attached video?

It makes sense to me after watching a bit. And apparently the participants picked things up quickly too, if you take the presenter at his word.

@NateBarham @flargh Yeah, the video is what I found kinda hard to follow.

@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.