With the magnifier no longer being offset - does your finger now not completely cover it? Definitely does raise some good points though - it’s so difficult to get to the select all button on iOS when you actually need it
The cursor will stay in the same place if you move your finger down some so it's not obscuring the selection; on a multi-line input, the first line's selection area extends down a half an inch or so, with all the lower lines displaced by a similar amount.
It's not too bad when you get used to it though I still miss the glass when I'm using my phone or my smaller iPad.
They dropped the magnifier between iOS 12 and 13. That's been bugging me quite a bit too as I was very used to using that to make cursor movement easier.
You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
At some point on iOS they deprecated the "magnifying glass" that appeared when you held down on a piece of text, instead making your finger "pick up" the cursor. They've eventually re-introduced a similar (but worse, as it automatically starts a selection at the current word) functionality it but during that time it was very annoying.
I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove that?
> Also, in the past you could tap and hold on text and it would magnify the view around where you were tapping, but that feature was dropped at some point.
Seems to have already changed, because that's not how it looks on mine. There's no whitespace between the buttons in the list, so (on iPhone X) the first two and a tiny bit of the third are visible. I'm assuming their view would now be the first and a small piece of the second.
Crazy something like that was ever released though.
Same here. Noticed it since upgrading to IOS 15. Pinch/spread to zoom out/in in safari is also sometimes infuriatingly difficult to do now too. They’ve screwed something up in the touch/gesture support.
Edit: also in case anyone from Apple is reading this, I’m also constantly accidentally switching to the tab overview screen when I attempt to scroll down, which is a new annoying gesture I never ran into before and now wish I could disable.
Edit 2: my typing is also less accurate now too. I don’t have any hard evidence here, but anecdotally I am CONSTANTLY typing “abd” now instead of “and,” which makes no sense at all, given autocorrect.
> Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
FYI: Triple-tap is for sentences. Quadruple-tap is for paragraphs.
Text selection is the one area that the lack of 3D Touch affects me the most, and I am truly upset about it.
With last year's phone/iOS, you could 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard and enter a cursor-move mode. This was replaced with the spacebar thing, which is fine.
But then while moving your cursor around in the old version, you could 3D Touch again to select a word, again for a sentence, and again for the paragraph. I could select text so easily! This made deleting sections or copy/pasting bits of edited text sooooo much easier.
Now it's significantly worse. I can move the cursor fine, but then to select text I have to use my fingers to tap on the text directly and it's much more difficult to be precise. (Why? Because I can't see through my fingers, surprisingly. You can see through a cursor just fine.)
Sigh. I'm really disappointed in this change specifically.
The touch version has a user interface issue. When swiping on iOS it's very easy to accidentally swipe too far in the left and accidentally page back. I did this several times and have no idea if it altered my results.
So I read this article with my iPad and of course that made me immediately start exploring the text selection within the article - it appears that it has changed in iOS 17 Safari and applies several ideas from the article.
* Immediately start dragging. When you pause it immediately enters text selection. If you move slowly you get the loupe otherwise it starts jumping word by word in the text
* When you release you get the popup options to do something with your text
* Holding the end of the selection and moving slowly gives you fine control over the cursor.
* When editing this comment, it doesn’t immediately jump to selection but gives you cursor control right away after long press with the magnified loupe. Move fast enough and the magnifier disappears. This is different behavior from long pressing the space bar.
* Double tap and drag gives you the selection behavior.
* Double tap and no drag selects the word.
Actual coding on a touchscreen is still impossible even with the articles improvements. I’d like to see more work on that. I wonder if speaking to our devices inaudibly could be the long term way forward.
> I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.
I have an iPad without that feature, and it's maybe 5 years old? I think it's a newer feature.
Also, in the past you could tap and hold on text and it would magnify the view around where you were tapping, but that feature was dropped at some point.
Picking up and moving the cursor in iOS 13 shows the cursor about half a centimetre above my finger as soon as I move the finger up or down at all. The precise location it will be moved to is perfectly visible to me. Is this not how the feature works for everyone else?
I'd bet this was done on purpose, since the optical centering of "Revert" is improved by this change.
However, Apple should reduce this optical offset for smaller buttons with relatively larger text, e.g. those in the Bluetooth System Preferences panel.
The side-effect is that all-caps button text is no longer optically-centered, but that's a relatively-rare case other than the "OK" button.
I agree that the described bug is a very frustrating bug. As for old squares vs the new circles, that's an aesthetic choice I'm sure some will like and some won't. My impression is that the old UI is more in keeping with the HP calculator it emulated. Personally it's not something I'm overly concerned about but I can understand how some may be. (Don't get me started on the Contacts icon which I can never seem to be able to find.)
> "and had a larger touch area"
Your comment regarding touch area made me curious. While the button image area is smaller, in my very simple and admittedly limited tests I seem to be able to activate the button with touching the button only tangentially. Even with my pinky I can't not activate a button when attempting to avoid them by pressing in the space between them. This leads me to believe either the active area extends beyond the button image area, or, more pragmatically, fingers are large enough that they're going to end up activating the buttons regardless. Would you mind going into more detail in how you determined that the touch area is reduced in the iOS 11 calculator?
Better accessibility? Just to note that position fixed with an input element receiving focus will break on iOS. Its a long-standing bug with very few work-arounds.
(that said, I realise you can't apply these styles to iOS anyway, it is a mute point).
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