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.
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.
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…
>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.
One of the really hidden ones in iOS is press-and-hold the on-screen spacebar to move the text cursor around. I found that one entirely by accident, and it’s made text entry a lot less painful.
Yeah, that has to be my favorite use-case for the force-touch on iOS. The way text selection works on iOS has never felt that smooth, but force touch takes away some of the worst pain.
Shame it’s got zero discoverability. Most people I know are surprised when I show them that. It also has quite a steep learning curve for some. Plus, some of the more advanced useful stuff is pretty hard to use - for example, did you know you can switch to text selection by “pulsing” your finger twice while pressing the keyboard?
I consider my phone devices mostly read only. I do have an iPad and text editing is better, but still there are still stumbling blocks. Entering text is pretty easy, and making large scale cut/copy/paste edits is OK. It's the smaller edits, adding or changing punctuation, fixing typos, transposing words, or changing small words (‘the’ to ‘a’, for example), where I find difficulty with the behavior of the selection function.
Yeah, text selection alone would probably be enough for me not to do this. It's insanely bad on iOS, and you need to do it all the time if you write code. Constantly.
I'm so glad someone's working on this! Text editing on mobile has never been an invisible problem to me. I usually think Apple really nails good UI and UX, but text editing on an iPhone has never been good. (As the article mentions, it's "good enough" for short quick things like texts or whatever, but not so good for anything longer.)
The solution presented here is half-great, IMO. I really love the persistant cursor and dragging anywhere jumps the cursor to there. And the magnifier is great here too.
But I'm not crazy about "pressing harder" to do anything. Apple's 3D Touch never worked too well for me, despite the fact that I usually like Apple's UI and UX, and I'd be willing to bet Apple's implementation was the best implementation of that so far. Maybe this is something that I'd get used to if using?
I'm also not crazy about the proposed menu. It seems like it would be kind of confusing to me, like the way inverted-mouse (or joystick) feels right in some games and wrong in others. Or similarly, how inverted scrollwheel scrolling might feel right to someone used to touchpad scrolling but wrong to someone not used to touchpads. Again, though, maybe after trying it out it would actually work OK. It's kind of hard to say, but I'm skeptical.
Regardless, I'm really glad there's at least someone trying to rethink and improve text editing on mobile. I wonder if anyone can come up with enough of an improvement that Google or Apple would change how it is on their phones? Or is it too late, and they're going to stick with what we have forever because too many people are already used to it?
> Edit: I just discovered now that if you long-press on the text to place the cursor, you get a little magnified view and it does let you place the cursor in the middle of a word. So that's probably the most efficient method currently available.
I chuckled a little at this as this is one of the oldest features of iOS, probably even from back in the pre-iPhone 4 days.
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.
Perhaps I misunderstood though - is this hard press when the cursor is on the word.
I guess I just don't really see the problem it solves, it's just moving my thumb over the text I want rather than three distinct actions just to start the selection. Then I guess two more to change the selection and end the selection process? Whereas to select text I just long press -> move. Or for one word, long press.
Precision seems fine as I test it here, and if I want sub-word selections (rare) then adjustments seem like a reasonable approach. If the selection on iOS snaps to words anyway (second force press selects whole word?) you'd need this on both platforms.
I don't really understand how the android approach requires more interaction. Press & drag is surely less interaction than press (get cursor), drag (position cursor), press (select word), drag (move cursor), press (finish selection).
The only selections I generally want without moving "off" the keyboard is deletions, and that's accomplished just by dragging from the backspace.
I've been in contact with Daniel Hooper, who originally came up with the idea and made the video posted other day, and he says he's happy to see people adopt it in their apps. I think Daniel deserves a great deal of credit for putting this idea out there in the open instead of patenting it like some large companies might be tempted to do.
I've been implementing this functionality in my own word processor, UX Write, and will have it included in the first version when its released in the next few weeks. I've posted some details on my own implementation at http://www.uxproductivity.com/blog/2012/05/05/text-selection...
I noticed that in this video they have a separate button above the keyboard for triggering selection, instead of using the shift key like in Daniel's demo. I ran into some conflicts with the shift key between my own gesture recognition and the built-in keyboard logic, as I suspect the developer of SlideWriter did too. The separate button looks like a good solution.
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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