The more I use my iPhone X, the better I am at it. I actually prefer its keyboard to the iPad’s for prose now, because you can long press the period and select text much more easily. If you can do that with the iPad, I’ve not found it yet.
On the contrary, selecting, cutting and pasting text is awfully cumbersome (on iPhone), together with placing the cursor in the desired spot, but typing is almost ok, and on the iPad I can type normally - it's the editing that doesn't work well.
Text selection on iOS can indeed be a pain, particularly in Safari where it seems to lock onto html divs ignoring your selection and jump to the entire paragraph.
On iPads and 3D Touch iPhones things are generally a lot better outside safari and when editing text. You can 3D Touch or two finger poke the on screen keyboard to activate a text cursor and even select text by pushing again with 3D Touch. you can do the same with an iPad but it’s a little more clunky requiring an extra tap.
But did you try reading and browsing with it for hours a day? I never had such a great reading experience!(;
I don't think it was meant to substitue for writing long texts. However, you can buy the iPad keyboard dock to use the standard Apple keyboard layout. And honestly, after having burned through so many keyboards in my life - these Apple keyboards really get me exited every time I use them!
>The only thing that's really missing to make editing text on the ipad a breeze is a way to select while moving the cursor with the two finger gesture above.
You can. Double-tap a word or character so it's selected, then do the two-finger select gesture on the keyboard.
I've found the complete opposite - I can hardly work an iPhone keyboard now. I'm amazed at how fast typing on the iPad is - although I've still not worked out where I should be looking keyboard (for finger placement), or text (for typos)
If you hold down the spacebar in iOS, you can move the text cursor around pretty easily. You can also double tap a word to select it. Sometimes it is a little clunky though…
Both have the same inconveniences, but the iPad keys are bigger so it will always be better.
I find the iOS' problems with text editing don't really have much to do with its keyboard though. For instance, the "press, hold, move awkward magnifying bubble to relocate cursor" sequence is utterly boneheaded and they need something better; I don't mind occasionally typing the wrong key as long as I can quickly move the insertion point to make a correction and I can't.
The article doesn't mention two great features on iOS:
- Move cursor by tap-and-hold on soace bar
- tap-tap for word selection and tap-tap-tap for sentence selection.
Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS version. Some major change, apparently related to spellchecker, hinders cursor movement now and results in entire words being unintentionally selected all the time.
(PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.)
Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it.
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words.
None of those are slow. You know you can:
1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor?
2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries?
3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text?
Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?
Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.
For iPhone, you can force-press on the keyboard (on newer phones), or just long-press on the space bar. On an iPad, you can use two fingers on the keyboard
Text selection on inside a textarea is pretty easy on the iPad and iPhone if you are using the on-screen keyboards. On the iPhone you can use force-touch on the keyboard area and then move the cursor wherever you wish. Force-pressing again starts a selection. On the iPad you use two fingers to drag across the on-screen keyboard and tap with two fingers begin selecting, which doesn‘t really work if you are using a hardware keyboard. So it‘s a mixed bag.
Very often all I have is an iPhone and maybe an iPad. I don't do enough hardcore editing to justify carrying around a laptop anymore. So I would definitely welcome better text editing features on iOS even if it's not the best tool for the job. It's funny because I originally thought the text input via touch would be the biggest problem but I'm now crazy fast with it. It's the editing that really slows me down.
How would you maintain consistency when it came to selecting text when the keyboard wasn't present? I like it otherwise. As everyone knows, selecting/etc text on iPad is a pain.
The keyboard dictation feature in iOS is indispensable to me. It's about 90-95% accurate which is just enough for me to be able to generate any written communication faster.
There’s a lot here I agree with. I dread text entry on iOS and it never seems to get that much better. It seems in many ways to have regressed in iOS 17 as well with things like invisible/near zero contrast text selection, hit detection being generally broken, it likes to super aggressively interpret taps anywhere near a word as me wanting to select a word when I’m just trying to reposition the cursor (and generally a word that’s not even close), and all kinds of other annoyances and friction.
But in addition the keyboards just don’t seem to be very good. I can’t tell you for how long now I’ve been infuriated by entering a search in iOS Safari only to have every word separated by a ‘.’ because of how it overloads the right edge of the to have a period right where my thumb likes to go.
I’ve tried numerous third party keyboards and they are all some sort of combination of “bad”, so I always end up going back to the built-in one after a while.
These are all far from solved problems, it’s just that it seems like a lot of people are so accustomed to the friction that it just seems like one of those inevitable things.
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