[HN Gopher] Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
___________________________________________________________________
Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
Author : kaftan-permans
Score : 873 points
Date : 2023-09-24 07:03 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jenson.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jenson.org)
| azeirah wrote:
| For what it's worth, I do feel like text editing is a big problem
| on Mobile. This is why I got myself a samsung note-line phone,
| the stylus greatly improves the text editing experience by
| basically being about as precise as a cursor and having a second
| button.
|
| I still wish text editing was better, I like taking notes on
| things usually on Obsidian and the entire mobile text writing and
| more importantly editing is just not too great, but as the demo
| shows it can be improved a lot... :/
| ploum wrote:
| (too much rant, removing comment)
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > This, again, makes me lose all confidence toward humanity
|
| _Mobile text editing_ issues were what made you lose
| confidence? The fact that we have the luxury of nitpicking
| about such mundane issues (as opposed to, you know, starving)
| makes me realize how great humanity 's innovations have been.
|
| I looked at the video for Messagease, and I feel like this must
| be a joke. I can easily type their sample "the quick brown fox"
| example using Swiftkey-like tracing easily twice as fast as
| what they showed in their demo.
| taneq wrote:
| I've had a growing suspicion for a few years now that the iOS
| keyboard developers are just taking the piss. Given the level of
| technical ability displayed in literally every other aspect of
| the iPhone, there's no way that the keyboard can be THIS bad and
| getting worse except on purpose.
| failuser wrote:
| I still lament the effective death of physical phone keyboards,
| but it's decided by the users already, apparently. The new
| generation got used to be typing on the screen and don't even
| know what they are missing. Same with gaming: the gamepad with
| horrible accuracy that mandates autoaim and limited number of
| buttons became standard. I can't do fathom it, but people who
| grew up gamepads see no issue.
| diegoperini wrote:
| Now that we have foldables, I see no reason not to put a hardware
| keyboard to the bottom of one of the screens while the phone is
| unfolded.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "In which language?" And now you have a problem again.
| Nition wrote:
| > We saw this in our user testing when users tried to place the
| text cursor accurately: they would miss by a few characters...
|
| One small thing: I don't know how it works on Android, but I used
| to have an N9 and then the Jolla phone and you could tap anywhere
| in text to place the cursor there.
|
| iOS doesn't let you, except confusingly on the very first tap
| that activates the cursor. For subsequent taps, you can tap
| exactly where you want in the middle of a word and it _always_
| snaps the cursor to the start or end of that word.
|
| I'm pretty good at aiming at the right character to edit even
| with big fingers on a small screen. Let me do it!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Hold down the space bar and you can move the cursor wherever
| you want, also on Android. I'm surprised more people don't know
| about this feature.
| bombela wrote:
| On Android it often stutters, the cursor jumps across the
| characters at random speeds, sometimes it teleports sometimes
| it moves one character at a time smoothly. When you lift your
| thumb it often registers as an extra motion in an unexpected
| direction. And this is on a flagship Google phone. And it
| only allows left-right motion, not up-down.
|
| So even if you know about it. It's more an exercise in
| frustration than anything.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's not been my experience on Android, I can go left
| right up down just fine. I've tried this on SwiftKey
| keyboard however but I'm sure it's the same in GBoard.
| bombela wrote:
| I am using the Google keyboard, android 13, and I cannot
| go vertical only horizontal.
| dandy23 wrote:
| On my budget Samsung Android it works great.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not "on Android", it's whichever keyboard came with
| your phone. On iOS extremely small number of people use
| non-standard keyboard(it was later allowed), but on Android
| the keyboard was always an app and there are many.
| bombela wrote:
| It's the Google keyboard on a Google phone. Out of the
| box experience.
| verve_rat wrote:
| How is anyone supposed to discover that?
| Izkata wrote:
| At least for SwiftKey, it's one of the settings you can
| enable/disable.
| alas_coo wrote:
| How am I only discovering this now..
| Nition wrote:
| I know about it, but that's a second action (moving it after
| tapping), or a more difficult one (moving it all the way
| there via the spacebar touchpad). Most of the time if a tap
| would put the cursor where I tapped, it'd already be there.
|
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _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.
| Nition wrote:
| :(
|
| In my defence apparently it was removed in iOS 13 and
| only recently came back.
| jahewson wrote:
| It was still there but it required a force click anywhere
| on the keyboard.
| otp209 wrote:
| > I chuckled a little at this as this is one of the
| oldest features of iOS
|
| Reminiscent of how I feel whenever I copy and paste
| something on Android
| julianz wrote:
| Holding down the space bar on my (Google) keyboard brings up
| a popup to change the keyboard. Sliding my finger along the
| space bar shifts the cursor.
|
| I miss my very first Android phone (the original HTC Desire)
| which had a tiny hole they called an "optical trackball" that
| worked incredibly well for selecting text.
| raverbashing wrote:
| People don't know about it because it's not discoverable.
|
| I knew it, but I had to be told, and it's not too intuitive
| ghostpepper wrote:
| How would they? Apple loves to put useful features that are
| completely hidden unless you know the secret incantation to
| activate them.
| kagevf wrote:
| > 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _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._
|
| This is back in iOS/iPadOS 15.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You know what was great about text selection on the N9? When
| you dragged the cursor, you got that haptic tick-tick-tick for
| each character the cursor passed over. I'll admit I don't
| entirely understand _why_ this was so beneficial, but somehow
| it made it substantially easier to get the cursor to the right
| spot.
| Nition wrote:
| Yeah man, everything about the N9 merged hardware and
| software well. Like the curved glass and smooth edges going
| along with the edge swipe interaction.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I also used to move my cursor with high accuracy and I wish it
| was still an option.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Another issue I sometimes face is gestures around the screen edge
| are confused. Selecting text on the left edge will trigger "Back"
| in some cases.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| The author _almost_ saw the fix for this, but didn 't. Here's how
| you fix this:
|
| Buttons.
|
| Modern phones are horrifying examples of UX, largely because they
| don't have buttons. You get two buttons for volume, even though
| volume accounts for probably 1/10,000th of the UX of the user.
| You get one button for power, because how else do you turn it on?
| And if you're lucky you get a button where the fingerprint reader
| is. You also increasingly get an "assistant" button, which can
| often _only_ be used for activating a shitty voice assistant
| specific to the make of phone you have.
|
| Navigating text editing requires buttons. You can try to use
| touch tricks, but they're complicated, clunky and inaccurate. For
| ease of use you need buttons specific to editing. A mouse and
| keyboard have buttons and shortcuts for editing because a person
| needs specific functionality for specific use cases. So the phone
| needs more buttons to make this work.
|
| For physical buttons used for editing, nothing I've seen has ever
| surpassed the clickwheel. It worked for iPod, it worked for
| Blackberry. You can open menus, scroll _with precision_ , and
| select items. And a flat layout allows use as arrow keys,
| compared to the side-mounted version that only has two
| dimensions. You can emulate this on-screen, though it'll be
| inferior as haptic feedback is one of the important aspects of
| the precision of a clickwheel.
|
| Arrow keys are another important button layout. They allow
| precise navigation within a text field so you can get to the
| place you want to make a specific change in, without the clumsy
| finger-tapping that never works right. On-screen these need to be
| dedicated buttons, as a virtual clickwheel can't easily
| differentiate between just clicking on the top of the clickwheel
| versus using the arrow functionality, and the UX suffers.
|
| Another important button is the delete key, as opposed to
| backspace. You should be able to delete things in front of the
| cursor as well as behind it.
|
| And then there's the "select characters" cursor modifier. You
| should be able to start selecting text where the cursor is,
| navigate using your arrow keys, and then stop the selection, and
| then click one of the modifiers for copy/cut/paste or just start
| writing to replace it.
|
| And of course we need an undo button, in addition to buttons for
| cut/copy/paste so we don't need to long-finger-press to show an
| editing menu.
|
| Basically all the buttons I've mentioned could easily fit within
| an editing box at the bottom of the screen, with the text in the
| top screen. Having the buttons right there for the entirety of
| the editing session is the right UX. It's actually faster than
| keyboard shortcuts, it's more intuitive, and more accurate, with
| less precision required for the user.
|
| Maybe one day these stupid hardware vendors will get off their
| obsession with chasing Apple and finally introduce some useful
| buttons on the device again. Until then, fake buttons in an
| editing modal is the best choice.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| This problem was solved 20 years ago when devices like the
| Blackberry popularized the miniature physical keyboard. Those
| interfaces were much easier to type on than these crap touch
| keyboards we've been given. Phone manufacturers told us these are
| better, but in reality it's just cheaper to make a software
| keyboard interface than it is to make a bunch of tiny buttons.
|
| The original IPhone "un-solved" the problem and then every phone
| company copied Apple because that's what they all do. And here we
| all are complaining about this like it's 2010 all over again.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| This came up on TikTok for me after visiting this post, so there
| must be a cookie or tracker that saw what I was reading (or I
| suppose, it's complete coincidence). Whatever the reason, this is
| helpful: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86HSvwL/
| ozim wrote:
| I have DroidVim on my mobile.
|
| Time when I really appreciated Vim was when I realized it is such
| a great way to edit text file on a small touch keyboard.
|
| I call text editing on mobile solved issue ;)
| plaidfuji wrote:
| 1000% agree with this post, wow. I can't believe this is
| controversial.. it's a disaster. I dread opening the mobile
| version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more
| than a grocery list.
|
| The problem is the target audience for this is business
| customers, and particularly those in management, so it's a small
| market. ICs aren't up and down as much between meetings and can
| largely stick to their desktop setup. But the manager's life is
| one of constant movement, reviewing and making comments on
| things, drafting, editing, tweaking, etc... and usually in blocks
| of time where it doesn't quite make sense to sit all the way down
| (unless you're really good at calendar management, which.. also
| sucks on mobile!)
|
| > fixing text editing isn't seen as important enough in the war
| between Android and iOS.
|
| I think there's a group of people for whom this would make all
| the difference. It's just not your typical consumer.
|
| EDIT: and before you say "sounds like you just want a tablet" - I
| don't! A tablet is the difference between lugging around a
| briefcase with me everywhere, or not.
| mastax wrote:
| This is what folding phones are great for. The extra space is
| great for multitasking, reading spreadsheets, viewing
| calendars, reading documents, etc.
|
| They don't really help with writing or editing text, unless you
| have big hands and need a larger keyboard. Most of the
| difficulty with text editing are related to the cursor, as the
| article points out, and a bigger screen doesn't really help. I
| suppose the extra real estate can be used for a docked or
| floating menu.
| fragmede wrote:
| As long as we're looking at hardware that isn't a glass
| rectangle, the Blackberry was pretty great for text input. So
| sad hardware keyboards died off.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Surprised it didn't mention the lack of a "Delete" key (at
| least in the standard Android keyboard). All that is provided
| is Backspace. On the desktop, I use Delete and Backspace
| equally, depending on where my cursor happens to be.
| mid-kid wrote:
| Can't speak for everyone but it took me a decade of computer
| usage to even "fit" the delete key in my text editing
| workflow and getting used to reaching for it. I still don't
| use it much, and it doesn't help that it's hard to reach on
| laptops and not simply shift+backspace. I think of the delete
| key as a power-user feature.
| reedciccio wrote:
| You may have grown up with a Mac if you think the delete
| key is a key for a power user :)
| eviks wrote:
| Hard to reach keys can be rebound too easy to reach, eg you
| can have
|
| right alt + h to backspace right alt + g to delete
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Are folding phones a solution for managers?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If they're a clamshell style with a physical keyboard, as
| with the Psion Series 5, possibly:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>
|
| Folding-screen phones are an expensive gimmick, with
| inevitable exceedingly expensive repairs:
|
| <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/the-pixel-folds-
| scre...>
|
| I predict a flop along the lines of 3DTV.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Folding phones are much easier to type on, but not close to a
| real keyboard.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I generally agree and also disagree with a few aspects of both
| your comment and the OP.
|
| First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I
| absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a
| pain. I can do it if I'm away from a computer and have to, but
| I don't enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of
| concentration.
|
| As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS
| works pretty well--although it took me a few years to learn
| about it.
|
| I do think text editing could always be better and I actually
| think it's a pretty broad use case. I'm also not convinced
| mobile is easily adapted to it, especially without really good
| text input [probably speech] which also isn't suitable in a lot
| of situations.
| functoid wrote:
| > As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on
| iOS works pretty well--although it took me a few years to
| learn about it.
|
| It's great until you need to move the cursor downward. Being
| completely undiscoverable doesn't help.
|
| Maybe we need something like the old thinkpad nub on
| touchscreen keyboards.
| Pamar wrote:
| _It's great until you need to move the cursor downward._
|
| Actually I just discovered the spacebar trick thanks to the
| parent comment and... I can move up and down in a block of
| text by using the same method.
|
| Maybe I don't understand what you mean?
| functoid wrote:
| You can move the cursor up maybe 10 lines from where you
| start before going off the edge of the keyboard.
|
| Now try moving down 10 lines from where you start.
| Hopefully you will see the issue with starting from the
| spacebar at the bottom edge of the screen.
| Pamar wrote:
| Ah ok, thanks - I experimented with a iPhone note and did
| not go very far, actually.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Holy cow, you just improved my life!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRUCnZFv9Ro
| ghaff wrote:
| When I somehow inadvertently found out about this a few
| years back, I was "How could I not know this?"
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| I have been using this sine iphone 6/3d touch era and it is
| ok, but has gotten worse.
|
| 1. The space bar is a much smaller target than the original
| whole keyboard and I often find myself needing multiple press
| drags.
|
| 2. Something changed recently and it is harder to hit your
| placement target in text especially in single line inputs.
| When this happens your cursor ends up back where it was or at
| the start of the line. It is particularly difficult to edit
| or select a url in the safari menu bar.
|
| Note: I used the space bar cursor placement at least 5 times
| writing this. It would have been much more difficult without.
| jprete wrote:
| > As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on
| iOS works pretty well -- although it took me a few years to
| learn about it.
|
| I did not know this and it's a godsend. I have otherwise
| found iOS cursor positioning to be awful, especially when
| text selection is involved as well. Thank you.
| gochi wrote:
| Most operating systems have a lot of really useful
| shortcuts that most people don't use despite it potentially
| making their lives 10x easier like Ctrl/Cmd+C. Swipe to
| undo, holding down the key to access accented keys (also
| works on address bars as it prompts you to add common
| domains like .com or .net), slide to type, etc. An easy way
| to discover most of these (on iOS specifically) is just to
| go through the working with text section in the iOS Tips
| app.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Holding down spacebar and swiping side to side changes
| keyboard language for me. Have to hold stationary for quite a
| bit longer before it becomes a cursor mover.
| wayfinder wrote:
| Maybe I'm a leet kid but I type 65 WPM on my phone so I find
| actual typing on my phone on par with typing on desktop,
| except if special punctuation is involved.
|
| ...but the whole mobile experience is still terrible with a
| lot of scrolling, panning, and annoying text selection.
|
| I'm aware most people don't type that fast so they would
| never type on mobile but for those that do, it would be sweet
| if the mobile experience was better.
|
| One thing I found out on iOS recently is that you can shake
| your phone for text undo.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm probably more like 20 with a much higher error rate
| than on my laptop. And more focus required.
| jraph wrote:
| Wouldn't typing on a touchscreen for long periods cause RSI
| much faster than a keyboard in the long term?
|
| (because of the body positioning - back, neck - and the
| hard surface)
|
| (not arguing against improving typing on mobile, obviously)
| wayfinder wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprised.
|
| Truthfully I'm most worried about the thumbs. I feel like
| they can ache if I've been doomscrolling for hours
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't understand why a tablet requires lugging a briefcase
| around? Just carry it raw between meetings and put it down if
| you need two hands for something. If you already carry papers
| around, get a folding keyboard case. Maybe we're just thinking
| of different working environments and I'm imagining an office
| whereas you're imagining a job site or something.
|
| The actual reason that a tablet isn't the answer is that the
| Google docs app for iPads is incredibly bad (I've had one
| second per letter max typing speeds with it, though thankfully
| it buffered my key presses). And then the solution kinda sucks
| because you would want a light laptop (eg MacBook Air or
| windows equivalent) but closing the lid will add too large a
| delay so you'll need to carry it around half-open, which isn't
| great but also isn't lugging around a briefcase.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I used Acer Iconia W4-821, a 8" tablet on Win8 for some time.
|
| It was great for my use case, to tinker with PwSh/CentOS VM
| while commuting or ocassional meetings as a notetaking app.
| Sadly it wasn't _the_ device even I (a big, tall guy with big
| hands) could haul around with ease. It really wanted some
| sort of case /minibag or whatever. It was perfectly fine with
| a backpack or a messenger bag, but how often do you see
| people with a messenger bag in the office or meeting?
|
| EDIT: the best _case_ for it would had been some sort of a
| pistol holster or a leg tacticool holster... even I would
| mutter 'Nerd' on sight of this.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > I don't understand why a tablet requires lugging a
| briefcase around? Just carry it raw between meetings and put
| it down if you need two hands for something.
|
| Being forced to carry the tablet every time you're moving
| during a work day is annoying. The big issue is not moving
| between meetings, it's every other movement during the day.
| For example getting lunch or getting to the office
| (especially on e.g. the subway or bike).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Ah ok, I was imagining keeping it in the office.
| iKlsR wrote:
| The moment I opened the article and started reading an idea
| came to me before reaching the authors solution. Imagine if you
| could just double tap a word and suddenly it becomes focused
| and enlargened while slightly blurring the rest of the text.
| The word in question now has easily targetable tap targets that
| you can modify quickly, swipe up to delete, rearrange, select
| etc like a sliding puzzle game. Like everyone I've had the same
| problem but in a majority of the cases its to fix something
| that the phone suggested or accidentally added to the directory
| that I can't easily remove (thanks ios) and nothing overly
| complex.
| fragmede wrote:
| An especially sucky part of editing text is changing tense or
| plurality. Changing "run" or "ran" or "running" is a exercise
| in frustration because the editor could easily change it for
| you by reading what you're typing.
|
| Eg I have "bottles are falling" typed out, but I go back and
| edit it to say "bottle are falling", and then the editor
| offers to update "are" to "is" for me.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Swype keyboard used to have this feature built in. Put the
| cursor on a word, any word (made earlier by swype's edit
| keyboard, which had cursor controls), and tap the Swype
| key. You'd be presented with a list of alternates/stems,
| with the current word as the root. At minimum you got
| simple plurals
|
| Gboard has a similar edit keyboard, although I find it's a
| tad harder to get to than Swype's
| jprete wrote:
| A lot of the problem (for me at least) is that phone text-
| selection UIs are way too stateful. It's very easy to mistime
| a tap and get a word select instead of selecting a different
| spot. It's also very easy to misposition a tap and select too
| much, or not enough.
|
| Adding text-selection features is IMO not the best approach.
| I'd actually rather they reduced the feature set and made the
| effects of UI actions less dependent on the state of the text
| selection UI.
| dameyawn wrote:
| I think the target market is huge. My wife, for example, spends
| tons of time writing out stuff for Instagram posts, some quite
| long. And I see tons more across social media that is largely
| done on people's phones.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thewarrior wrote:
| This is where speech to text models like Whisper and LLMs can
| make a real difference.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Just to be clear, the problem here isn't entering text, but
| with editing it. With better keyboards, voice transcription,
| and physical keyboards on many tablets, getting text into a
| device is not the problem it used to be. However, you will
| always want to edit your words afterwards._
|
| From TFA.
| thewarrior wrote:
| "Rewrite this sentence to be more concise"
| jprete wrote:
| I personally don't like speech-to-text because then you're
| broadcasting every word you write to everyone around you.
|
| It might be better with a specially-trained model that uses
| stenographer-style compression that only you know, so drive-
| by eavesdroppers can't translate your text entry on the fly.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No -- those are for typing. This is about editing. Totally
| different things.
| [deleted]
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Yeah, the bizarrely apologetic tone of this article was a real
| turn off. I don't think any reasonable person would classify
| text editing on mobile as anything less than needing a full
| overhaul. Also, whose feelings are we sparing here by being
| apologetic for criticizing it?
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| To me the article reads as if it was originally targeted at
| his colleagues at google who told him they weren't going to
| implement his ideas.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| This is honestly why I carry my GPD MicroPC with me now, as its
| almost as portable as the phone, and unfathomably easier to do
| things like draft emails, do text editing and other basics,
| than my phone is.
| dingnuts wrote:
| that has to look hilarious in the grocery store, I just have
| to say
|
| I need to get a replacement battery for mine after it drained
| too deeply and no longer will charge :( They didn't push out
| some kind of fix for that, did they?
| Grimburger wrote:
| > business customers, and particularly those in management, so
| it's a small market
|
| Is it really that small? It sounds like a massive market to me.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's substantial _both_ in size (total people) _and_ in
| impact and economic impact.
| dihrbtk wrote:
| not in constrast with basically the entire planet (the
| overall market for smartphones)
| ketzo wrote:
| It's literally the market that created the BlackBerry, one of
| the most influential devices of the last 20 years, so yeah
| it's a big group.
| lettergram wrote:
| and yet blackberry went away...
| dheera wrote:
| > I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or
| even Notes for anything more than a grocery list.
|
| I dread it even for grocery lists. For one the apps (Notion,
| Google Docs, you name it) all give me a stupid splash screen
| when I tap them, and I have to wait 5-10 seconds to see
| content. We're in 2023. Splash screens should be unnecessary.
| Opening a piece of text should take no more than 50ms after the
| tap on the app icon.
|
| About half the grocery stores I frequent have no cell phone
| signal. Why the HELL can't a device in 2023, with all the
| machine learning we have today, deduce from my GPS track and
| time/day deduce that I'm probably headed to one of several
| grocery stores, record that the last time said grocery store
| had no signal, and pre-download anything that looks like a
| grocery list, or hell, labelled explicitly as one? And do
| whatever rendering it needs off screen so that it's no more
| than 25ms from tapping the app icon to viewing it? It has a
| GHz+ processor, 90Hz screen, 25ms isn't a tall ask to render
| some text. 5-10 seconds? What are engineers busy doing?
|
| And this is why I still use post-its for grocery lists.
| tomNth wrote:
| I have an online text editor open in the browser, and use
| that (i use editpad.org, but there are many others).
| paradox460 wrote:
| I like AnyList for this. Keeps the groceries synced to your
| phone, sticks things in relatively sane categories, is fairly
| customizable, supports multiple real time editors (so my wife
| and I can both check stuff off as we add it around the
| store), has a web interface, and until Google decided to ruin
| it, had a nice smart speaker integration
| eviks wrote:
| We've had this device for many years, you're just using
| bloated apps
|
| Just tested Simplenote on a very old phone, reopens
| immediately in the list and I can type/check mark items right
| away (though first open takes longer) Apple notes is also
| snappy
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > It's just not your typical consumer.
|
| My only disagreement. I think many people _don 't know they
| want something better_ because they've never used something
| better. The video in the link describes how the users do short
| texts to get around the problem [0], including deleting whole
| blocks of text instead of editing. Teenagers, parents, and many
| others communicate heavily through texts and are often "up and
| down" like management/business users. On the whole I believe
| _many_ people would benefit from a better text editing
| experience.
|
| [0]:
| https://programs.sigchi.org/uist/2021/program/content/61484
| CalRobert wrote:
| I desperately miss my HTC touch Pro two and its slider
| keyboard. It was a dream.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I want a modern touch pro from Google - slider keyboard, no
| bloatware or Samsung apps, nice big battery and modern
| screen, one nice camera, proper landscape support all over,
| and 5 years of updates.
|
| I don't need 15 cameras or ai anything. Heck make it a
| battery + keyboard case that goes on to a pixel and does a
| decent typing job and I'd buy it.
| nomel wrote:
| The more experience I get in the working world, the more I
| realize that the hardest problem is finding people that see
| there is a problem.
| happymellon wrote:
| I miss my Blackberry for typing.
|
| The tactile feedback of real keys was so much better than
| haptic screens.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yes, a big part of the problem is that so so many words
| need editing.
|
| I updated to ios17 excited about the new transformer model,
| and it still predicts absolute BS words I've never used in
| my life.
|
| I definitely remember typing working better on my iPhone 5
| which was 20% smaller so I don't know what's gone wrong,
| but it's gone really wrong and the fixes also suck.
| marmaduke wrote:
| I had the first SE, and it initially handled mixed
| language text correction phenomenally, but went downhill
| with each update, which was really puzzling
| florbo wrote:
| For me it's the original Motorola Droid and Droid 2. The
| slide-out keyboards have been the best mobile text editing
| experience I've had.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The way cursor movement by touch was implemented on BB10
| Wwas also the best I've ever used on mobile. Some kind of
| adaptive zoom and tap to move by one position.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I agree although I have never used a Blackberry. I have
| used a dozen of smart phone models in the early 2000s,
| either with physical keyboards or resistive touch. And then
| the iphone came and everybody moved to capacitive touch. It
| might have some advantages, but precise working is not one
| of them. I still hate it 15 years later what shitty
| products we have to use despite of all engineering efforts
| buried in them.
| pzs wrote:
| This. Ever since I lost the physical keyboard of the
| blackberry, I have had to accept to live with a significant
| and constant productivity hit when it comes to writing more
| than a couple of words on my touchscreen phones with the
| need to avoid typing errors. I failed to master the act of
| writing on a cellphone, contrary to typing on a physical
| keyboard.
|
| I have seen people type blazingly fast on touchscreen
| phones though, albeit I didn't run error stats on their
| output. I accept that I may lack some skills needed to
| become better at this, but seeing others highlighting that
| this is a problem to them is not surprising to me, based on
| anecdotal evidence.
|
| E.g., I knew someone who added to his email signature a
| permanent apology for typing errors giving the
| justification that he was typing on a touchscreen device.
|
| All in all, I agree that the problem is real, and havging
| had experience with a working solution (physical keyboard)
| I wonder why there appears to be no business case today for
| such devices.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| It's funny, as I was writing this comment I thought, "it's
| almost like they need to make a blackberry for the
| smartphone era - oh wait..."
| skydhash wrote:
| Remember T9? I haven't much experience with it--I'm young.
| But it was a much more pleasant experience than the current
| experience with touch screen. Swiping works, but I feel it
| requires too much cognitive energy. As soon as a
| conversation is taking longer than this paragraph, I tend
| to call the person instead.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
| happymellon wrote:
| I got downvoted a lot when I mentioned missing T9
| previously.
|
| It could be nostalgia, but I was pretty quick and
| generally accurate sending short messages.
|
| Not sure I would want to type a document on T9.
| rpz wrote:
| Agreed I remember being faster than my friends who
| preferred the "abc" mode. Not sure if all phones did this
| but my phones would sort the words by frequency of use
| for each combination of button presses so T9 kept getting
| faster the more I used it.
| msh wrote:
| I tried t9 when I in the name of simplicity went for a
| Nokia candy bar. It was utter shit. I think it only
| worked because there was no good alternatives back then.
| hollandheese wrote:
| T9 was so terrible I didn't use text messaging until I
| got my first iPhone.
|
| Actual Keyboard >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Touch
| screen typing >>>>>>> T9
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| T9 was terrible for you.
|
| You could literally type the message without taking the
| phone out of the pocket because it was extremely
| predictable and you knew the menu structure by the gut.
| hollandheese wrote:
| It's more like T9 wasn't terrible for you. There's a good
| reason it died off. Touch screen keyboards are better for
| 99% of the population.
| stavros wrote:
| Agreed, I would routinely text without looking. I do now
| too, with SwiftKey, but it's much less deterministic.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Sounds like a small, niche but very real market and
| product: A keyboard case with Bluetooth (but security!) or
| USB-C.
|
| Bonus points for e-ink-based keys.
|
| Edit: Realistically I'd be surprised if something like this
| doesn't already exist.
| happymellon wrote:
| https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/bbq20-keyboard-with-
| track...
|
| What about an updated BlackBerry Torch 9800?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| That looks pretty cool, and others must've thought that
| as well because it's sold out.
|
| Some of the immediate things that came to mind were
| making a case that integrates the phone with the
| keyboard; and a small battery to extend the life of the
| phone since the keyboard adds to the formfactor anyway.
|
| Bonus points if this creates a market for a small phone
| again (iphone 12 user here).
| dleslie wrote:
| This is why I own a Titan Pocket. Physical keyboards are
| simply superior.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> before you say "sounds like you just want a tablet"_
|
| One of my friends uses a GPD Pocket 3, which is an 8-inch
| computer that's small enough to fit in your pocket, with a full
| keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen that swivels to become a
| tablet. It's pretty nifty. https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
| screye wrote:
| I'd say purchase a folding phone. It's great.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| It doesn't address this editing issue at all. It somewhat
| attempts to address multi-tasking, but this thread is
| specifically about how poor the text editing experience is,
| and I'd like to hear how a folding phone fixes that?
|
| I have an iPad and even there without a mouse plugged in,
| the editing experience is poor.
| screye wrote:
| You're correct. It isn't a direct solution. For the most
| part, it makes the selection experience easier, which
| then makes the editing experience easier.
|
| But I wouldn't underestimate how big a difference it is.
| One difference between a folding phone and an iPad, is
| that I can reach every part of my screen with my thumbs
| still in their resting position. It feels a lot more
| ergonomic to have an 8 inch 4:3 screen than a larger
| 16:10 screen that requires hands gymnastics to touch
| type.
|
| Hold to select word. Drag to extend selection. Drag pops
| up the edit menu by default, which takes little screen
| real estate and zero additional clicks to do a cut/copy.
| Lastly, a cut/copy automatically puts the snippet as the
| top recommendation on my auto complete bar on the
| keyboard. So paste doesn't need triggering the edit menu
| again.
|
| Samsung doesn't have a double tap experience. So it
| removes that ambiguity.
|
| I have the stubbiest fingers I know and I type a lot ; as
| my HN profile bears witness. So I have heavily user-
| tested this experience that I claim to love so much.
| knodi wrote:
| Shocker! touch is not the best at complex and precise
| input. But it's great for general purpose use and
| buttons. Problem is we all at some point in our day,
| week, month need to do something complex on the touch
| device, which becomes a challenging task and experience.
| dTal wrote:
| Although they used the 'Pocket' brand for the Pocket 3, it is
| really a GPD MicroPC 2. The original MicroPC was 6 inches and
| is an even better candidate for "phone sized laptop". The
| crazy thing is that it's perfectly usable and much more
| productive than a phone - if it could make phone calls and
| had the same sensor suite as a smartphone, it would be
| superior along _every axis_.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Oh wow! I remember the 1st and 2nd Gen.! The 3rd one is so
| nice! I don't need one any soon, but it looks like I'd love
| to have one later in the future. I'm very curious what
| would the next gens look like.
| ljlolel wrote:
| The new iPhone is 6.7 inches so nearly there?
| walteweiss wrote:
| I found even better laptop, if you don't need any extra slots
| (most of the time I don't):
|
| GPD P2 Max 2022. The world's smallest Ultrabook:
| https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022
| thrownblown wrote:
| As a bit of a GPD fanboi I have both a pocket 2 and a
| pocket max. When I was a server admin, pocket 2 went
| everywhere with me in a pelican case. That was just this
| side of too bulky to carry without noticing.
|
| Pocket max in the pelican was just on the other side of
| that threshold.
|
| The benefit of the pocket 2 is the full windows/linux
| installation alongside the usable qwerty keyboard.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| I love the concept... but in that price range, I'm no longer
| comfortable just carrying it around with me, which partially
| negates the reason for getting it.
| civilitty wrote:
| Given the (really cool) KVM module with HDMI input and USB
| keyboard/mouse output, it really feels like an enterprise
| datacenter product.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Sadly, the .hk kills it. I can't even look at the page, my
| corp network geoip blocks China's IP addresses completely.
|
| Corp would never let a Chinese created device on network.
| ako wrote:
| I don't think screen size is the limiting factor when
| editing, but the lack of a convenient keyboard. I've edited
| quite large texts with a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my
| phone. Currently have a Nuphy air 75 and keychron k15 pro,
| small sized, mechanical, ergonomic Bluetooth keyboards, both
| make editing pretty acceptable.
| ghaff wrote:
| To be honest, I haven't even been able to make a tablet
| really work for me as a serious laptop replacement for any
| halfway serious office productivity work. Except for a very
| short trip I bring a laptop because otherwise I'll run into
| something I have trouble doing that I need to do.
| ako wrote:
| True, but i feel the same way about laptops. For true
| productivity i need at least one big display, so will
| usually dock it with an external display, keyboard and
| mouse. Funny thing is that the modern iPads connected to
| an external display gives more or less the same
| experience as a laptop (as long as you're not
| programming...)
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a multi-display desktop. I accept I'm not going to
| have full capabilities if I'm not at home. For travel an
| external display on an iPad is a nonstarter.
| fragmede wrote:
| But then you need a table or some sort of surface to put
| the keyboard on, and then I might as well use my laptop if
| I have it. I want better editing for when I'm standing in
| line at the grocery store with one hand free.
|
| I have a keyboard that I've attached a guitar strap to, in
| order to be able to type while standing, without a table to
| rest the keyboard on.
| jstarfish wrote:
| You reinvented...the keytar.
|
| I miss the Sidekick, myself. Was the perfect device for
| writing while standing. Physical keyboard _and_ a big-ish
| screen, with the form of a modern smartphone.
|
| The swivel design made finding a decent case tough
| though. And there were few apps.
| bahmboo wrote:
| Which was an influence on the first Android device, the
| HTC Dream. Swivel keyboard AND a trackball. It was pretty
| cool but unfortunately didn't catch on.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The audience might be bigger than we're inclined to think. For
| a lot of the next generation, mobile is by far their main
| computer.
| Pxtl wrote:
| This wouldn't even be hard to fix. Give me a modal button on the
| keyboard for cursor mode, like how we've the numerical keyboard
| mode. When pressed, shows arrow-keys, ctrl-arrow-keys,
| pageup/pagedown, home/end, a delete (not backspace) key, a shift-
| toggle, and a button that shows the longpress copy/paste menu.
|
| There. No need to reinvent the wheel, just do the same stuff
| desktop does but with the actual keys desktop has.
|
| The spacebar-drag trick is cool, but it's not enough.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I can buy into the fact that text editing on phones is a pain,
| but the solutions presented in the video seemed _very_
| unconvincing for me. The "only magnify in place" option is
| obviously a horrible idea. I don't know about you but my thumb is
| not transparent. The whole reason for moving the magnified piece
| off to the side is so that _you can actually see it_. The problem
| isn 't as evident in the video because there is no finger in the
| way, but I just was imagining this behavior on the comment I'm
| currently typing, and there is no way I'd be able to see the
| magnified content if it worked like the proposed solution in the
| video.
| vicek22 wrote:
| > The "only magnify in place" option is obviously a horrible
| idea. I don't know about you but my thumb is not transparent.
|
| I think you misunderstood the proposed solution. If you look at
| the video, the magnification is offset. The improvement is that
| the cursor is only visible in the magnification.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| But the only way to magnify the place _where you just tapped_
| (that is, inline, where the magnification shows where the
| text is on the page) as you drag would essentially be to not
| move the cursor as your finger moves (i.e. wait until your
| finger gets out of the way).
|
| I don't even understand how this would work if you're
| dragging up (going to a previous point in the text).
| larodi wrote:
| you are right, thinking the same - the solutions are more in
| the same directions, but not actually something in the right
| directions.
|
| the windows mobile had some interesing design decisions with
| text, and particularly nice large menus that... were so big
| they didnt fit the screen. best stuff I've seen in UI design
| for like ever since.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| I honestly think this problem is unsolvable, like, you can only
| do so much with typing on screen.
|
| Maybe with a device that read your mind and allowed you to type
| by thinking, but with that aside, I don't think there is a
| solution. I think this is a fundamental limitation of mobile.
| jzb wrote:
| I 100% agree with this. My teen, OTOH, refuses to use a keyboard
| to write papers or do anything. She finds it completely normal
| and preferable to write on her phone. To me this feels like using
| a hammer to chop wood, but it's her native input method.
|
| Allegedly this is standard in her age group. Makes me wonder
| about the next few waves of people entering the workforce and
| whether they're going to hate using keyboards for input.
| jchw wrote:
| The vast difference in editing things on a MicroPC with its
| touchpad and physical keyboard versus a phone is _immense_. I 'm
| pretty sure I can legitimately type faster and usually navigate
| UIs faster on a capacitive touch phone, but the frustration of
| typing and targeting the cursor is unbelievable even after having
| used smartphones for over a decade now. It's just bad.
|
| It is amusing that it's hard to convince people this is a
| problem, but I sort-of understand. Over time people have learned
| to just, not edit text on mobile. There's relatively powerful
| versions of office suites on modern mobile OSes, certainly more
| powerful than Windows CE devices that had full keyboards would
| ever ship with, and yet most people don't even really consider
| doing much on mobile other than sending messages and taking
| notes, two things that rarely require dragging the cursor. When
| editing things you quickly type out, gestures like dragging the
| spacebar to move the cursor around is usually "good enough" for
| making small edits to fix typos or change the wording, which
| makes it feel like a non-issue.
|
| On Pinephone with Squeekboard, I greatly miss the ability to drag
| on the spacebar to move text, and even slightly miss the ability
| to swipe across keys to type. And yet, the weird thing is, even
| though text editing on Phosh is significantly less refined than
| either Android or iOS... I ultimately don't have much harder of a
| time doing it. And I think that speaks volumes on its own.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Every time I pick up my pinephone I feel immense disappointment
| in what forms of interaction most devices are stuck with today,
| despite how easily alternatives can be implemented in an open
| platform like the pinephone. But for just editing text, I find
| vim and emacs surprisingly usable with a touch keyboard, as
| long as the numbers and needed symbols and modifiers are on the
| base layer.
|
| Precise pointing / fat fingering is solved for text editing and
| in general, by using the touchscreen for relative input - like
| a touchpad. That's possible on the pinephone with a very simple
| program that directly interfaces with evdev and uinput[1],
| taking the ability to run desktop software well beyond being a
| party trick. All it's missing is a scheme where single, double,
| or two-finger taps and drags are either relative or absolute to
| avoid having to switch modes.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator
|
| For swipe input, wvkbd[2] has experimental support that works
| amusingly well for how sucklessly it's implemented (see the
| readme), albeit only for long words or reduced dictionaries (so
| many possibilities, like having zsh write completions to a
| file). It needs a patch to not interfere with normal typing,
| however. Spacebar swiping could be another patch (or on sxmo
| into lisgd instead*). Or maybe a smaller key could be given a
| 4-way swipe gesture like the Windows 10 Mobile keyboard's
| trackpoint. (btw, hey, the MessageEase patent expired...)
|
| [2] https://git.sr.ht/~proycon/wvkbd
|
| * <rant>I don't know how the devs bear the latency that
| sxmo_inputhandler.sh brings - switching basic OS shell
| operations in a long shell script on a platform where every
| expansion piped to grep causes a noticeable increase in latency
| is strangely unsuckless!
| robomartin wrote:
| > Text editing on mobile isn't OK
|
| No, it's completely broken. And mobile is an absolute mess. The
| touch system is so utterly overloaded with functionality that it
| effectively makes all these wonderful things completely opaque
| and, in a lot of cases, not discoverable at all.
|
| Ask any iOS user what single, double, triple clicks mean. Ask
| them if they know about long touch on the spacebar. Ask them to
| show you everything they know about how to operate the device.
|
| What you'll learn is that the vast majority of people pretty know
| nothing about the function overloading of touch and gestures.
| They know simple touch interaction and that's about it.
|
| The touch screen, whether it is on a phone or in a car, exists
| for one simple reason: It is a lot easier to make UI decisions
| when you don't have to make them. It's cheaper. It's faster to
| design. Manufacturing costs are lower. Testing is simpler.
|
| Having design many physical control panels during my career, for
| products ranging from commercial through aerospace, I can tell
| you it is a difficult grueling process. In short, pain in the
| ass. And, if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can't
| just compile your way out of it. Hardware is hard (and expensive)
| for a reason.
|
| Today's smart phone designers flat-out refuse to _add_ physical
| UI elements to their phones, instead, choosing contorted ways to
| overload the touch interface.
|
| Prior to iOS devices I owned some very interesting phones and
| PDA's by companies like Motorola, Blackberry and Palm. In the
| aggregate, these companies had interesting physical UI ideas that
| worked very well.
|
| A stylus, for example, is brilliantly simple and better than your
| finger, particularly if more sophisticated, as seen on Wacom
| tablets.
|
| Blackberry had a small trackball you could also click right on
| the keyboard (another very useful UI element). It was great for
| editing text and other use cases. Heck, you could use a browser
| with a proper desktop-style cursor.
|
| Motorola had a click-wheel on a PDA-like add-on to their flip
| phones. Fantastic for navigation and super easy to use. The clip-
| on also had additional buttons, that made such things as single-
| handed almost-blind address book navigation very simple.
|
| Also, touch screens are incredibly fragile. Example, during a
| call, any accidental touch will cause problems. I have resorted
| to switching away from the phone application during my call and,
| if I have to move around (while wearing a headset) placing the
| phone facing outward in my pant pocket. I've had too many cases
| of the phone doing stupid things during a call when in my pocket
| facing inward.
|
| In short, touch screens are terrible for the consumer in a lot of
| use cases. They are fantastic for the manufacturer because they
| don't have to make any decisions, manufacture a single product
| and all is well so long as the torture they inflict on their
| customers is just below a pain threshold.
|
| There are so many potentially interesting ideas that could be
| explored. Adding a set of user-programmable physical macro
| buttons somewhere (sides or back). Adding a small cursor-only
| touch pad to the back for, well, pointing control. Click and
| right click could be actual buttons. Blackberry's mini trackball
| was brilliant. And a real keyboard, as a first-class citizen add-
| on, not something left to third parties with no real support past
| the basics.
|
| If someone wants to make heavy use of a device they would love a
| real full-width keyboard that clips-on and folds open with a
| Blackberry style trackball and a few extra keys and functions.
| Lots of people buy cases for their phones. I would absolutely buy
| an official fold-out keyboard/case if it was truly integrated so
| I could actually use the thing without having to remember what
| triple-click-press-slide-right-and-face-north f-ing means.
|
| For me, the phone is unusable for anything beyond the trivial. I
| hate browsing the internet with it. I don't buy anything other
| than Uber rides with it. I don't use it to buy anything on
| Amazon. Text messaging for work is useless other than the very
| basic, because it is horrible to edit anything and there is no
| real desktop integration to track and search as you can with an
| email client.
|
| Which brings me to the other problem with mobile:
|
| It's 2023.
|
| Why isn't my phone seamlessly integrated with my computer?
|
| When I plug-in or otherwise connect my phone to my desktop or
| laptop, the phone's screen should appear on my desktop as a
| first-class citizen for full interaction without having to touch
| my phone. I should be able to edit text on my phone from my
| desktop in a phone window. I should be able to cut, copy and
| paste anything between desktop and mobile. I should be able to
| run applications on my phone and interact with them on one of my
| three 27 inch screens. I should be able to click on a phone
| number on the desktop and dial it on the phone. I should be able
| to use the same headphones I use on my desktop to run a call on
| the phone through the desktop interface. I should be able to
| move, copy and manage files on the phone from my laptop. Etc.
|
| I don't really understand what mobile designers are doing. It
| seems that they stopped being creative and holding their user's
| best interests as their primary guidance. They slap a touch
| screen on an aluminum frame, use as few buttons as absolutely
| possible. Limit desktop integration to the absolute minimum
| (iTunes is garbage) and leave third parties to hack stuff
| together rather than develop exquisitely integrated solution.
|
| I could be wrong on this. I firmly believe Microsoft still has a
| real shot at a next generation phone. Their Windows Phone attempt
| was a failure for many reasons. What is lacking today are the
| things I mentioned above, and more. As ridiculous as it may sound
| in 2023 --because it should have been done by now-- having a
| device that fully integrates with desktop in an exquisitely
| usable symbiotic relationship would be nothing less than amazing.
| That, I believe, would gain traction.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| iOS text editing with the tap and hold to move cursor is a
| nightmare, and couple that with its extremely poor spelling
| correction which I have to go to google with the misspelled word
| amd have it predict instead
| nottheengineer wrote:
| I find text editing on mobile to be fine, I'd have to try this to
| see if it's any better.
|
| The article did skip over one important QOL feature that every
| modern keyboard has: Swiping the spacebar to move the cursor. It
| solves a lot of the things the author complains about.
|
| The thing that causes me physical pain when writing something on
| mobile is the web. Browsers/websites misinterpret inputs into
| text fields all the time. Trying to scroll the text field while
| it has an active selection? Great, now your keyboard is closed
| and the selection is gone.
| alepar wrote:
| Not invisible for me. I do occassinally enter moderate amounts of
| text 3-4 paragraphs). I also like to iterate on my texts, so I do
| a lot of editing and entering at the same time.
|
| The points mentioned in the article are painful, but something I
| could get adjusted to and get better at with time. There are a
| couple of things for me though, that I just can't work around,
| and which are subsequently the biggest pain points for me. These
| are: lack of vertical space in landscape mode and broken text
| selection feature. Let me elaborate. Note that I own a google
| pixel phone, so can't really speak for iphones or androids from
| other companies.
|
| Pixels gravitate towards long and narrow displays. This can be
| great for portrait mode, but sucks for landscape most of the
| time. The issue is made so much worse that neither OS or most
| apps seem to try to optimize for this mode, further wasting the
| space available. For example, I'm typing this post in Firefox on
| my phone right now. About 1/3rd of the screen is taken up by the
| keyboard. This is fine and is actually the reason I use landscape
| mode - bigger keyboard allows for faster typing. Another 1/3rd
| however is taken up by a combination of notification bar at the
| top, gesture hint bar at the bottom and firefox's address bar.
| With some manipulation you can make the adress bar go away, but
| the other two bars can not be hidden on pixels period. Perhaps
| the biggest frustration is the fact that the "fullscreen" mode I
| want is already implemented on Android for games and such,
| there's just no way to turn it on for firefox in either the app
| itself or the OS.
|
| Text selection tends to be broken when selecting several
| paragraphs of text, especially when selecting existing text from
| a web page - the teardrop just jumps around violently not letting
| you to put it where you want it. Sometimes you can wrestle it
| with multiple attempts, but other times it just won't let you
| leaving you with the only workaround of selecting in smaller
| blocks.
|
| This reminds me there actually was one somewhat recent
| improvement to text editing on androids from few years back:
| ability to move cursor by sliding your finger over the space bar.
| That eliminated one big pain point I used to have.
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| One thing this article does not mention and what makes mobile
| text editing _slightly_ more bearable: Using the volume buttons
| to control the text cursor.
|
| It doesn't support desktop modifiers like Ctrl or Shift, but at
| least you can properly place the cursor where you want without
| going mad. For some reason, only LineageOS has that feature, and
| not even every other ROM. I once tried a different ROM and
| switched back because the feature was missing, horrible.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I recently upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 13 mini. I thought I
| would miss the home button, but what I really miss is 3D Touch in
| the keyboard for moving the cursor. It doesn't solve editing text
| on mobile, but it went a long way.
| htk wrote:
| Hold the space key and it also becomes a trackpad.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Thanks! Happy to know that feature is not completely gone. I
| actually asked at the apple store about this, but they
| thought there was no equivalent in the new phones.
| airstrike wrote:
| This is an opportune time as any to mention that TextEditor on
| SwiftUI doesn't have a placeholder field... smh
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/texteditor
| olvy0 wrote:
| Excellent article. I have long thought that mobile has horrible
| UX, especially for typing. I don't know how other people aren't
| more annoyed. For me it's because I can touch type relatively
| fast on a real keyboard, and can switch between a mouse and a
| keyboard very fast. It's sooo frustrating not having the same
| speed on mobile while editing.
|
| For writing prose, gboard is bad, but it's the least bad
| solution, its sliding gestures and predictions are good enough.
|
| I use unexpected keyboard for programming on the go. Free and
| open source, originally developed for termux. It has arrow keys
| and modifiers, and undo also works (ctrl z). TBH it's not perfect
| for me as it doesn't have predictive text and its arrow keys are
| fiddly, so I use it sparingly.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| People produce less text with more errors in more time on mobile.
| I actively avoid having to type anything on mobile. If I have my
| laptop open, I'll use whatsapp or signal on that. I often wait
| replying on either of those until I get my laptop. Just way less
| frustrating to not have to correct >25% of my key presses. If I
| have to use the mobile keyboard, I'll often just send a message
| with typos, no capitals, and skip some of the more redundant
| words. It seems lots of people do that. Phones just suck for text
| input. Longform text entering on a phone is by and large not a
| thing for most people. It's mostly a read only device for
| passively consuming news and media. And taking photos.
|
| I find it telling that one of the more popular addons for ipads
| are covers with a builtin keyboard. It's a way bigger device than
| an iphone. But yet the keyboard sucks enough that Apple sells
| covers with a keyboard. Of course, all the touchscreen keyboard
| problems that the ipad has are magnified on their iphone. Yet,
| they don't have a solution for that. And they also sell a stylus
| for the ipad. Because fingers lack precision. It's the same OS
| but there seem to be no such options for the iphone. Does the
| stylus even work with an iphone? Is that deliberate? It's not
| like people are going to be magically more precise on an iphone
| relative to a huge ipad. Conclusion, Apple just accepts that
| that's the way things are. And besides, Steve Jobs would turn in
| his grave if they dared to ship an iphone with a stylus.
|
| Hardware keyboards on phones used to be a thing. I worked at
| Nokia back in the day. Really nice keyboards. Blackberries were
| popular too. People wrote lots of stuff on those things. I
| wouldn't mind a little pocket laptop. It's not like my pixel 6 is
| small or subtle in my pocket. It would be more useful with a
| slide out keyboard.
| jskherman wrote:
| Skill issue /s
|
| https://x.com/naofalxyz/status/1702673333446496434
| ok123456 wrote:
| It was much better when you could get phones with physical
| keyboards. Only recently has swipe on android gotten to the
| accuracy of typing on a physical phone keyboard, but not the
| accuracy.
|
| But, that was lost because of the iphonification of the whole
| smart phone sector.
| lolinder wrote:
| I find that typing on a phone (iPhone or Android) these days is
| _substantially_ easier than typing on an iPad because of swipe.
| It 's still nowhere as efficient as a keyboard in the hands of
| a skilled typist, but I can often produce text fast enough that
| it isn't worth getting out my laptop. On an iPad it's far
| worse, because I actually do have to use the bad QWERTY
| touchscreen key-by-key.
|
| What I keep hoping for as far as input methods go is a swipe
| keyboard layout that is _optimized_ for swipe, because QWERTY
| has a few groupings that make for ambiguities. Someone
| calculated one a few years ago that puts the vowels as far
| apart as possible [0].
|
| [0] https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-
| layou...
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| The iPad keyboard has a floating option that takes swipe
| input. There used to be a split keyboard option, which I
| actually used all the time, but it was removed from newer
| models for unfathomable reasons.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I don't think stylus is the answer on phone for text input.
| Maybe on a phablet. I haven't experienced it being better and
| only use pencil on my iPad when in a meeting where typing or
| using a laptop would be obnoxious.
|
| The Apple Pencil doesn't work on the phones. But even if it
| did, it would be ridiculous and un-Apple given that the pencil
| is disproportionately huge compared to the phone itself. I
| personally wish they would do something for the rare customer
| who does need it (e.g. for precise drawing on the go). But
| they'd need a separate Apple Pencil Mini product.
|
| I think Apple's answer is that you should use speech-to-text or
| just serve voice messages, both seem quite popular with the
| crowd that isn't on HN.
| craighay1 wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a
| good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch
| devices.
|
| It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the
| keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices.
| Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb
| typing on a screen.
|
| Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on
| letter based inference could be interesting for one handed /
| single digit entry of letters. Something like dasher:
| https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/dashersummary.html
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)
| lachlan_gray wrote:
| On an iPhone if you hold the space bar down the whole keyboard
| becomes a kind of trackpad which you can use to move the
| cursor.
|
| Since all the keys disappear, it doesn't seem like a stretch to
| add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select
| text or paste in a specific spot in that "mode".
|
| Right now it's so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.
| _Microft wrote:
| As the finger starts close to the bottom edge of the screen,
| I always struggle with moving the cursor downwards. Is there
| a trick for that?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| You can hold down on every key, not just the space bar.
| teolandon wrote:
| I think you can only 3D touch on other keys. If you have
| one of the newer iPhones without 3D touch you have to
| long press the spacebar.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Except for keys that have alternate accent keys, and I
| don't think it's possible at all on the other keys when
| you have swipe typing available.
| failuser wrote:
| You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on
| the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did
| not have to wait for the long press to register.
| chatmasta wrote:
| What do you mean "tap somewhere else on the Keyboard?" Once
| I hold down the space bar and then let go, the keyboard
| disappears. And I just tried some combination of this and
| got into a frozen state where the keyboard was missing and
| I had to kill Safari.
|
| EDIT: Oh, I need to use a second finger. Cool.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Holy crap. I've been using the space bar for years to move
| the cursor, I had no idea you could _select_ with it too.
| Thank you!
|
| It's even officially documented as well [1]. I wonder if
| selection was introduced when the spacebar cursor was, or
| if it was later.
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-
| onscree...
| whycome wrote:
| Super great. Doesn't work on gboard. Why isn't a period
| and comma a default on these keyboards??
| jameshart wrote:
| Unfortunately this affordance isn't available when trying
| to make a selection in noneditable text.
|
| Since often on mobile devices I am responding to comment
| threads (in slack or gitlab or Jira, or indeed right now on
| HN, for example) the challenges I have in copy-pasting are
| often in grabbing text from a prior comment to quote,
| rather than in selecting my own text.
| failuser wrote:
| To be fair you can't drop a caret (the edit cursor) into
| non-editable text in most desktop applications as well.
| And that's a missed opportunity there too. I think Chrome
| got less agreesive in changing your selection to match
| word bounaries, but it was very annyone for a while. I
| think you could void it by holding Shift, but that had
| some other side-effects in some pages.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think internet explorer did this selection thing at one
| point years ago. I don't recall chrome doing it. Firefox
| used to have a 'caret browsing' feature but people didn't
| use it so it was eventually removed. So I don't really
| think it's a missed opportunity so much as a feature
| people didn't sufficiently love.
| bombela wrote:
| Press F6 in firefox for caret browsing.
| savoyard wrote:
| That would be F7. The same works in Chrome.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Ah I didn't realise it still existed. I think I must have
| misremembered the warning as being a deprecation notice.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Thanks. I don't know how much RSI I'd be saved from if I
| knew this years ago. Apple, if you're listening, you should
| advertise this better. Ok, maybe not for the new iPhone
| user, but maybe for a user in his 2nd year or one which
| does a lot of text input.
| cstrahan wrote:
| > You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere
| else on the keyboard.
|
| Doesn't appear to work.
|
| What _does_ work is pushing a little harder (i.e. "force
| touch") with the same finger/thumb that initiated the move-
| cursor-via-spacebar gesture.
|
| Only problem there is that sometimes the forcetouch doesn't
| register (no matter how hard you pinch the screen), or is
| too trigger happy and starts selecting text when you only
| wanted to move the cursor.
| Pxtl wrote:
| In gboard we've already got modal stuff for numerical keypad,
| emojis, special characters (2 different modal pages), etc.
|
| Adding one more modal keyboard page for cursor-editing (arrow
| keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, home/end, pgup/godown, select-toggle-
| button, delete, rclick menu) would just make sense. Would just
| be getting the rest of the desktop keyboard into the phone
| keyboard, nothing groundbreaking.
| somethingsidont wrote:
| This exists on Android Gboard, though it's hidden in some
| menus by default. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.xda-developers.com/gboard-v6-2-adds-cursor-
| contr... (2017)
| davidinosauro wrote:
| Wow, indeed it's still there in GBoard!
|
| Thank you for sharing, I could never have found it before
| knowing it exists.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| They already have an option to move your visit by dragging
| across spacebar. Why not just replace half of the oversized
| spacebar key with something useful?
| miniupuchaty wrote:
| I've been using nvim in termux on foldable phone since I've
| bought phone in that form factor. It works great, I'm using
| "unexpected keyboard" as input method for faster special
| symbols access. It works pretty well. Good enough for me to
| program on the go.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know about the Unexpected Keyboard app.
| It'll take some getting used to, but having arrow keys and
| punctuation available without changing modes is pretty
| awesome.
|
| I can even hit Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, etc.
| This alone will help text editing on my phone.
| soupbowl wrote:
| This is also the first I have heard of this keyboard, it is
| incredible.
| witrak wrote:
| Seems to be quite an improvement. Thank you for the tip!
| But it would be even better if it had "stylus mode"
| because, with a precision stylus, it's easier to tap
| directly alternate characters than to drag from the center
| of the button toward the needed variant.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart
| phone user.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I dunno, Samsung's default keyboard already has am
| implementation of modal editing, which was loved by most of
| it's users that I knew.
|
| Not in the same way as vim, but you could hit a hot key to
| switch your keyboard to a navigation/select/copy+paste mode.
| eviks wrote:
| That's fine, the average computer user also doesn't use modal
| editing
| mikepurvis wrote:
| But nowadays you can install custom keyboards on every OS
| that could probably get you most of the way there.
| eviks wrote:
| Do you know of an example?
| genter wrote:
| There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention
| business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots
| of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the
| way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write
| lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text
| entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist
| learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning
| Solidworks.
| troupe wrote:
| There may be fewer desktops, but laptops work the same way
| and they don't seem to be going away any time soon. I'm not
| aware of "tons of professional writers, lawyers, and other
| professionals that do lots of writing" who spend most of
| their writing time on the type of mobile devices described
| in this article.
| genter wrote:
| I'm not saying they are now. I'm saying they will in the
| future.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I really doubt people are every going to give up big
| stand-alone monitors.
|
| Putting cellphones on big standalone monitors might work.
| But in that case, we'll probably also need to attach a
| pointing device and some way of entering text, so from a
| UI point of view, we've got a desktop.
|
| Cellphones definitely have sufficient processing power
| for lots of typical office workloads nowadays... but
| using them in this way doesn't seem to have caught on.
|
| I dunno, eventually this sort of discussion ends up at
| "why didn't DeX take over the world," a question for
| which I have no good answers, since, like everyone else,
| I never tried it out.
| troupe wrote:
| I occasionally use DeX. It is fine, if you are needing to
| read email, browse the web, or do simple word processing,
| or need a touch interface for drawing. If I'm going to
| sit down and work for multiple hours, I'd rather be using
| my desktop applications.
| PeterisP wrote:
| No, the aforementioned users do not _need_ to write lots of
| text on mobile devices - a professional writer will choose
| or adapt their devices and environment to best suit the
| needs of their writing work, not adapt their writing to
| better suit the limitations of the devices; instead it 's
| all the "casual" users who need to make do with whatever
| device they have on hand even if that device was optimized
| for entirely different needs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| You can install blink shell, panic prompt, or whatever the
| popular iPhone ssh client of the day is and ssh over to your
| desktop to get a preview of how this would work.
|
| Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it is fine IMO. The screen is
| a little bit small. Sometimes if I'm going to SSH from my
| phone, I'll put the phone on a little stand _in front_ of the
| keyboard, so it can sit more like a foot from my face, or
| whatever (normal cellphone usage distance). Or, I'll put it in
| portrait mode farther away and think of it as "half a screen."
|
| Either way works fine for short stints. Nebulous concerns about
| eyeball heath for long sessions, although I have no real
| evidence to back that up, and we're all screwed on that front
| anyway, right?
| soupbowl wrote:
| I do this all the time but I have not found a Bluetooth
| keyboard that is portable and not total junk. Do you have any
| suggestions?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Nope; I had a fold out one for a while but inevitably one
| side seems to go bad.
|
| In the end I got Apple's Bluetooth keyboard, I like the
| scissor actuation or whatever, but it is slightly too big
| to be as portable as a cellphone.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| SSH isn't a solution. I'm trying to edit text _here on my
| phone_ , not out on some server.
|
| What GP is advocating is to replace the on-screen keyboard
| with a modal editing UX.
| gr__or wrote:
| Ima use this opportunity to advertise that I'm working on a
| mobile shader editor, an area even less adopted to the form
| factor and am using my structured code editing research[1] to
| smoothen the experience.
|
| The post echoed many of my frustrations and inspired me to
| consider adopting the fisheye-zoom to my editor.
|
| I'm looking for people interested in doing shader programming on
| the go to try this early version, hit me up if you are interested
| shade@dflate.io
|
| [1]: https://dflate.io/state-of-tofu
| teddyh wrote:
| > _While we should always take care of novice users first, we
| shouldn't ignore proficient users._
|
| I believe that the relation should be _reversed_ : Make the best
| system possible, usable by well-trained users, and _only then_
| add easy modes, tutorials, child safe modes, etc. with paths for
| improvement at every level. But when using modern systems, I
| often feel like I'm reduced to using Fisher-Price toys with one
| (inoperative) button.
| gochi wrote:
| You've made the experience more tedious to create now. If we
| adhere to the article's advice, you work from the novice
| upwards. You create more and more freedom as you go up, you
| also have an easier time catching problems between levels this
| way.
|
| In your proposal, we're expected to start from the top
| magically creating the best experience, and then jumping back
| down to novice users, and then scaling up back towards expert
| level to cover the gaps. It sounds quite jarring, and in
| practice it winds up leading to lackluster tutorials made by
| experts who overestimate everyone else's levels (see: "How to
| draw an owl: draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl").
| teddyh wrote:
| Creating a good system for advanced users is not magic.
|
| In practice, what tends to happen (when things go well, that
| is) is that people follow the same course as Douglas
| Engelbart's development of the NLS system, which he called
| "bootstrapping", and which we today might call "agile" or
| possibly "devops". I.e. the initial users are using the
| system from day 1, and developers are constantly giving users
| more options and features to aid the users, and since the
| developers are either in close cooperation with the users, or
| the groups simply overlap, the finished system (that is, when
| it starts to change more slowly) is one in which the system
| is quite complex, but all users are also advanced users who
| can use it at high speed to tremendous advantage.
|
| _This_ is the point at which you should go back and add
| intermediate levels, tutorials, easy modes, child proofing,
| etc.
| Sloppy wrote:
| Very nice ideas, please please please someone pick this up!
|
| Doing anything on a mobile device is far more painful than people
| assume. A generation of people are now unfamiliar with using a PC
| and although it has its problems, the use cases are far easier.
|
| Are these really solved cases?
|
| - multiple tabs in a browser. Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the
| desktop (errr mobile top?)
|
| - apps in general, why do they exist at all? Most are just
| slightly better web pages--ok I know it's just to give
| Apple&Google gatekeeper status and create a way to get paid for
| the app. but at a cost to users that is more and more annoying.
| Why have a mobile aware NYTimes.com AND an app? Ditch the apps
| where not really needed and do a decent one-page web app instead.
| No need to update, no special gatekeeper for install. If the
| first issue was solved, it would make mobile devices easier. I
| have no sympathy for the Mush burdened x-twitter but if they have
| a gripe with Apple do a decent web page and no gatekeeper is
| involved.
|
| - &^&%$#$$% passwords. Partly because of apps in general, all
| your passwords are hidden from your password manager, which is of
| dubious value on a mobile to begin with. Typing in that auto-
| generated password created by a password manager is HELL on a
| mobile device, text being hell as this article points out.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the desktop
|
| You mean why tabs are part of the browser rather the system?
| Kinda like the suckless way and utilizing tabbed to provide
| tabs to any app?
| [deleted]
| kurthr wrote:
| Please add some form of controllable _undo_.
|
| Not some weird shake dialog (iOS), or complete absence
| (Android).
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Any Blackberry that had a trackball\trackpad was great at editing
| text - because it had the cursor movement and text selection
| cleanly separated from the touch screen.
|
| Too bad that ship has sailed. I still miss my Bold every time I
| try to edit text on IOS
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Smartphones seem more of a consumption device then a creation
| device - text editing hassle is a big factor.
| throwerofstone wrote:
| I fully agree with the author on that text editing is nothing but
| cumbersome. But instead of modifying and (hopefully) improving on
| what we have now, I would actually prefer an entirely different
| solution; one that disables any touch input on textboxes.
|
| In place of touch, I'd prefer a new keyboard screen containing a
| joystick to move the text cursor with. On the opposite side of
| the keyboard, you could have all the context buttons, together
| with a 'select' button which can be held while moving the
| joystick to make a selection. Add a toggle button to the existing
| keyboard to switch from and to these new input options and you're
| all set.
|
| Whether this solution is intuitive enough for the average mobile
| user is up for discussion.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think this is a major cause of wikipedia not attracting new
| contributors like it used to.
| dTal wrote:
| - Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile"
|
| - Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer
| practical
|
| - "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the
| desktop, but to move mobile forward."
|
| Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing
| experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile"
| is pioneering is bad.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing
| experience as the inevitable future?
|
| The fact that the author worked at Google should be a hint.
| Advertising companies like Google want desktops and laptops to
| be left behind in favor of phones and tablets specifically
| because of the inferior, more locked down and consumption-
| focused computing experience they provide, and I'm guessing
| this idea is hammered into all their employees.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I agree with your general point but there's nothing
| _inherently_ bad about the smartphones themselves. They are
| perfectly good computers, it 's these big corporations who
| turn them into locked down approved content consumption
| machines. We shouldn't be dismissing these computers just
| because of that, we should be working to empower ourselves to
| use them to the fullest with projects like postmarketOS.
|
| I'm waiting for the new Pixel to come out so I can buy it and
| run grapheneOS on it. Then I'll try to port postmarketOS to
| my current phone.
| Nevermark wrote:
| >My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move
| mobile forward."
|
| >> Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing
| experience
|
| How would "mov[ing] mobile forward" privilege mobile?
|
| How would it impair your experience on your desktop?
| dTal wrote:
| The implication is clear from the wording. Desktop is "back",
| mobile is "forward".
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Like the linked article says,
|
| > Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption
|
| ... and will always be consumption devices.
|
| A television isn't a substitute for your laptop either.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Termux lets you turn your Android phone into a software
| development environment. It's surprisingly good.
| rappr wrote:
| Phones, sure, but there's plenty of good productivity and
| creation software available for tablets. And these days, most
| productivity software runs in the browser anyway.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Just because something is designed for consumption doesn't
| mean we should ignore text editing.
|
| The fact that there are other devices that are better at text
| editing is a _horrible_ reason to leave text editing on
| mobile devices as a terrible experience.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Because using my phone while lying down in bed or sitting in my
| couch is so much more comfortable than using a bulky laptop or
| personal computer while sitting in a chair. I've written way
| too much code inside Termux. It's gotten to the point I only
| use my laptop to edit open street map now.
|
| I'm looking for a way to build new Android apps inside Termux
| itself. Wonder if anyone here's managed it.
| tkuraku wrote:
| One of the issues is that most of us don't _want_ to edit text on
| mobile. Beyond quick checks I 'll wait till I have a big screen
| and a full size keyboard.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe we just need a speech-to-text interface.
|
| Like in the old days, with voice-recorders.
| pseingatl wrote:
| People seemed to be writing all the time with the Blackberry
| keyboard. Pity that a real keyboard is no longer available.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What they need is extra keys to move cursor by word, cut and
| paste. The tap and wait for menu sucks. You just need good old kb
| emulation for those things.
| mabbo wrote:
| When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were
| consistently asking for updates. I made a website called
| "is<wife's name>stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal
| website there. It was literally just route53 and cloudfront in
| front of an S3 bucket.
|
| But that meant I needed to make updates from the hospital with my
| phone. I mean yes there were probably better options but I was a
| bit busy at the time to think of them.
|
| Let me just say that writing raw HTML files using textedit for
| Android was not a great experience. It's just not the right
| interface for making complex text.
|
| Maybe LLMs will help with this, allowing us to describe what we
| want at a higher level, through voice or text. But God help me I
| do not want to try to write valid HTML on a phone (after being
| awake for 35 of the previous 36 hours).
| bruh2 wrote:
| This is so cool
| bshacklett wrote:
| Not exactly what you described, but I was reminded of this LLM-
| based prototyping tool:
|
| https://youtu.be/nhTyuuDZe4w?si=5bVPU7g5-WXJitlY
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| This is the kind of stuff you read on 4chan as memes about
| orange site. While going through all that you decided to create
| a website of all things and update it by hand editing html.
| Normal people, and I hate saying that, would create a
| facebook/WhatsApp group or something like that. I'm not making
| fun of you or anything, not everyone has the same lives, I'm
| just amazed by the hn crowd.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I was about to comment that using an LLM to update a static
| site can be seen as overkill like using napalm bombing
| against mosquitoes,
|
| and you post about those considering odd to have your own
| services to publish basic information...
|
| > _amazed by the hn crowd_ ... [whereas] _Normal people..._
|
| I have seen members of the "madding crowd" amazed by people
| reading a book. And not one: many, in different increasingly
| bewildering capacities. (Including "law enforcement", calling
| it "suspicious behaviour".)
|
| Be careful of what can be called "normalcy" nowadays.
| mabbo wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you. This was a very bad idea.
|
| But I was a few hours away from becoming a parent, hadn't
| slept much in days, and was not thinking very well.
|
| Sub-optimal decisions were made.
| zogrodea wrote:
| Congratulations on parenthood. I thought the decision was
| very much overkill myself, but it's impressive you had the
| determination and skill to execute it while in the state
| you describe. I doubt I would be able to.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I mean even if you are going to make a self-hosted site for
| this, like, there's software you can use where you're not
| using raw html. I use a static site generator that takes
| markdown. I don't find markdown too hard to write on mobile,
| as long as I don't need images.
| womitt wrote:
| Guys at craft.do shipped a good solution to this problem imho
| paultopia wrote:
| OH MY GOD YES THANK YOU
|
| Pasting is particularly hellish because of what essentially
| amounts to a zero-width tap target. Then add in poorly designed
| third party apps changing the interface (looking at you
| microsoft) and it's a nightmare.
| jackson1372 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I use these two constantly
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I completely agree with author's view of the issue. Text editing
| on iOS and android have always been an afterthought. I mean, how
| much time did it take for the iPhone to get Copy/Paste ?
|
| The weirder part to me was that the iPad didn't bring much
| improvement on that front. Even with a bigger screen and "desktop
| class" application, text editing only barely works with a
| keyboard/touchpad attached. The only improvement has been on
| moving the text cursor, yet it's still a real pain to select
| random text in the middle of a page.
|
| On the solution though .... I think we should really do something
| simpler than introduce new paradigms and further dig the "that's
| how we do it on mobile" well.
|
| Just give people damn arrow keys and a crontrol key: let them put
| a cursor on the middle of the text they want, move the cursor
| with ultimate precision exactly where they want it, and shift
| select the text they need.
|
| Android does the arrow part right, Windows' on screen keyboard
| does both right. It's incredible how liberating it is to just
| select text with the arrow keys, hit ctrl+C, crl+V it elsewhere
| and be done. That's really not that much to ask, Apple not doing
| anything in this front feels like sheer laziness at this point.
| Springtime wrote:
| _> I mean, how much time did it take for the iPhone to get Copy
| /Paste?_
|
| It's kind of sad to reflect that the Apple Newton had this
| almost a decade prior[1] to the first iPhone _and_ in an
| intuitive manner, by selecting text by highlighting it with the
| stylus then dragging it to the edge of the screen where it
| would remain in a truncated pill form for later retrieval
| (dragging out the pill to a document). No menus involved at
| all.
|
| [1] @ 30 seconds in:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sue2BR1AHUE
| ghaff wrote:
| I have an iPad that's about to go out of support and is
| starting to get some small cracks in a screen corner. Seriously
| wondering if I should replace it or just take an older, albeit
| heavier, MacBook for extended travel.
|
| I don't find myself using it at home much and media consumption
| on planes isn't that important to me any longer.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I tried an older macbook for a while, and it was kinda
| frustrating on two fronts:
|
| - reading is subpar
|
| Having the ipad in portrait helped a lot for reading A4 size
| documents, where I'd be much more scrolling on the macbook.
|
| The the form factor plays a lot when you're checking
| documents at an airport counter, reviewing your hotel
| reservation in a taxi, or looking at a map with others.
|
| - I had to baby it a lot more
|
| iPads and tablets in general can fit in cases and be lugged
| around without damage. The screen is also tough enough, where
| a macbook will be out of order if anything goes between the
| keyboard and the screen when you close it. That's fine at
| home, but that means it doesn't get out in any situation
| where it could be risky. In contrast I bring my tablet in the
| bathtub in a waterproof sleeve.
|
| None of those are absolute deal breakers, I mean we used
| laptops anywhere we could for decades before tablet areived.
| But I definitely couldn't go back (disclaimer, I ended up
| with a Surface Pro. It's nice but as Panos is out of
| Microsoft now, I have no idea of the future of the lineup...)
| ghaff wrote:
| That's all fair. For now I have an out of support mini
| Chromebook I can throw in my luggage in addition to a
| tablet. Bad I know. Maybe I should get a new one--it's
| cheap--and nurse my old tablet. I just try to avoid hauling
| too many electronics.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This is absolutely a problem, but I'm not convinced the author
| has found a solution. I'd have to try it to know for sure, but
| from the description, it still sounds finicky.
|
| I believe touch screens are fundamentally a bad interface for
| productivity. Consider the range of actions provided by a mouse:
| You can hover without clicking, you can left click, or you can
| right click, all with nearly pixel-level precision. Add in a
| keyboard and your options expand even further.
|
| A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse and an
| abnormally large, irregularly shaped cursor, where can never be
| sure which part of the cursor indicates your actual click target.
| Software on this computer is not aware of the cursor's location
| until after the mouse has been clicked, and portions of the
| screen are blacked out when you move the mouse to certain
| positions. Your keyboard only works when you bring up an on-
| screen overlay which takes up ~35% of your screen real-estate, on
| a monitor which is abnormally small to begin with.
|
| Could any amount of well-designed software make text entry
| efficient on this machine?
|
| This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.
| asddubs wrote:
| well yeah, a touchscreen is never going to be a keyboard, but
| that doesn't mean things couldn't be better
| jimkoen wrote:
| > This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.
|
| This is a UI validation problem.
|
| Apple proved in 2007 that you can port tons of applications
| over to the smartphone. They had to invent their own language
| for interactions though ("pinch-to-zoom" etc) and it took them
| two weeks of focus with all their software development staff
| involved to fix keyboards on capacitive touch.
|
| It may not be possible to reach the same kind of flexibility on
| a mobile device when it comes to rich text editing, but it's
| certainly possible to port over a lot of functionality from the
| desktop.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Do you really think Apple invented pinch-to-zoom? CMU Sensor
| Lab had it back in '85. Steve Jobs coincidentally visited
| soon after and later claimed to have patented the technology
| for the iPhone. That was shown not to be true in the big
| Apple vs. Samsung patent case.
|
| References available upon request.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| The first gen or so of Android phones had an optical 'trackpad'
| below the screen, some were terrible but some were really good,
| allowing far more precise cursor movement than a touchscreen. I
| wish this feature had survived, it was awesome for text
| editing.
| wffurr wrote:
| Some had a trackball which was fairly precise.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I agree, but note that a lot of this is solved by having a pen
| with buttons.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree, styluses are great! Placing the cursor and
| highlighting text on e.g. a Nintendo DS is a lot easier than
| on an iPhone. (Everything else about typing on the DS sucked
| of course, but it's not like Nintendo put substantial effort
| into that experience.)
|
| I do find that e.g. the Apple Pencil doesn't have a small
| enough tip for text selection to work well, it's really made
| for drawing.
| Y_Y wrote:
| (just to add, the Latin plural of or "stylus" is "styli",
| so in English we can use "styli" or "styluses")
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse "
|
| Not quite. A touchscreen can detect many fingers, that can do
| many gestures.
|
| The problem is, exept zooming (pinching with 2 fingers) and
| moving around (swiping with 2 fingers) the potential is pretty
| much unused.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's a good point, but I'm not sure how to use those gestures
| for text entry. TFA didn't go down the multi-touch route
| either in their proposal. But it's possible I'm not being
| creative enough!
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 3D touch solves some problems for touch interfaces, but sadly
| Apple killed it (everywhere except Magic Trackpad, for some
| reason).
| earthboundkid wrote:
| It never worked though. It would just pop in randomly at
| unexpected times. It sucked.
| somethingsome wrote:
| I use my phone extensively for writing and I must say I dont
| experience that much hassle in writing. Only two points:
|
| 1. The autocorrect is the worst part and the only real struggle
| as it often change the word not logically with the previous words
| (softkey) or it doesn't know the correct conjugation and changes
| it. Finally, the menu shortcut is way too close to the letter 'a'
| and I can't stop hitting it.
|
| 2. On the ergonomy side, only 'select text' is problematic for
| me, but not the long press + cursors, that's okay, it's more
| about cursors themselves when they reach the edges of the screen
| when I select whole paragraphs. I often find that I can't select
| the first letters. Therefore, I always need to select some
| letters from the paragraph above and remove, or select less and
| rewrite.. Another problem with it is selecting very big chunks of
| text, I would love a click somewhere + 'shift' click elsewhere to
| select all the text. Finally, the 'Semantic' web doesn't help
| sometimes when I can't select several paragraphs because they are
| not in the same Semantic unit.
|
| I the past I was carrying with me a small Bluetooth keyboard that
| could switch with a button between my phone and my tablet, but
| finally, writing on the phone was good enough.
|
| I have way less good experiences with writing code on the phone
| or interacting with a ssh session.
| MavropaliasG wrote:
| At the end of the article the author seems resigned and that it
| seems impossible to bring this to the end user. I don't
| understand why? Why can't this be a keyboard that I can switch
| to, like I'm able to switch from Samsung keyboard to Google
| keyboard? Or like an accessibility app?
| eulgro wrote:
| Because the text editing process is baked in the base UI
| classes on Android (TextView), you cannot change it with an
| app. OEM manufacturers sometimes do because they ship different
| class code with their OS.
| craighay1 wrote:
| But the author works at Google, so can surely pass the
| message on up the chain that this design decision is stifling
| innovation in touch-based text editing?
| Muromec wrote:
| It's a big company, so unless you can make a nice project
| to be promoted, it doesn't get in the list of priorities
| scottjenson wrote:
| I'm the author. I've been trying...
| p1mrx wrote:
| I suggest focusing on the minimum viable product: an app
| with a single text field.
|
| Maybe add the option to load and save txt files, but even
| clipboard I/O would be sufficient. Just let people play
| with the editor. If it's actually good, the next steps
| should become obvious.
| Rediscover wrote:
| I have termux (terminal emulator) installed on my android devices
| and make heavy use of sed(1) to edit then cat the text out, copy
| it to the clipboard and paste it into text messages, email, ...
| Works well for me.
|
| vi, cat, or emacs to generate the original text.
| rietta wrote:
| I hate my phone for any sort of editing. I just always bring a
| laptop. Tablets are nearly useless. I remember dreaming of the
| days of ubiquitous computing. Now we live in it and user
| experience sucks.
| kibwen wrote:
| The irony is that despite their conceptual elegance and
| increasing ubiquity, touchscreens are a technological dead end as
| far as HCI is concerned. As dim as I am on the current slate (and
| near-future) of VR headsets, their gestural interfaces are much
| more promising in the long run (though still lacking in some ways
| compared to mouse and keyboard).
| jacobp100 wrote:
| 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
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| On current Android, you can drag the cursor directly without
| seeing the teardrop, so your finger is directly over the
| cursor, requiring the magnifier to see what you are doing
|
| With the demo shown here, you always tap on the teardrop, below
| the magnifier, so the magnification is more to help you see
| rather than show you what's under your finger
| z3t4 wrote:
| My first smartphone in 2000 had a very thin pen, that allowed for
| high precision typing, selecting text, etc. The OS was made for
| pen usage. Android and iOS are however not designed for pen
| usage. I tried a Galaxy note, but due to Android not being pen
| friendly I ended up using my fingers instead. If you want to be
| productive, just use a stationary computer and all the ergonomics
| that comes with it. Some phone models today have USB-C and you
| can dock the phone to a keyboard/mouse & big screen and the
| smartphone will go into "desktop" mode.
| ellis0n wrote:
| I've been using a mobile device for programming since 2012 and I
| developed a mobile text editor and screen keyboard that I use
| myself. I think I have the richest experience here. The problem
| is that the people who create mobile input interfaces developed
| them on a computer in order to make a "product" for a company,
| not for people. This is also due to patents and other problems
| not related to this task like "It's not the flashy feature that
| shifts your Net Promoter Scores"
| sheep-a wrote:
| [flagged]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My solution to text editing on a mobile device is:
|
| - Use a hardware keyboard.
|
| - Install Termux.
|
| - Install and use vim (or emacs, or nano, or whatever) to edit.
| That is, _use a goddamned fucking text editor designed for the
| task._
|
| The fact that devices similar to the 1990s-era Psion Series 5 are
| rare as hen's teeth doesn't help. This was pocketable (given
| sufficiently large pockets), had basic office productivity apps
| preinstalled (word processor, spreadsheet, database, email,
| contact and diary manager), as well as its own scripting
| language. It was optimised for power consumption and battery
| life. I know at least one journalist who used the device to file
| copy on the road --- this was no toy.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>
|
| I'd love to see a modern update based on e-ink rather than LCD,
| as I wrote a few months ago:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36171805>
|
| (I did receive a highly intriguing email suggesting such a device
| might be in development but have had no further follow-ups.)
|
| There's a delicate balance between _size_ , _usefulness_ , and
| _portability_ which is challenging to get right. _In virtually
| all cases_ even the worst netbook-type compact laptop is superior
| _for any significant composing task_ than the best smartphone
| _or_ tablet. Touch-only interfaces are ultimately a dead-end.
|
| The section of Jenson's article on how taps can be misinterpreted
| should be tattooed to the forehead of every UI/UX designer, PM,
| and marketer on the planet, as well as stenciled to all office
| walls, windows, doors, and whiteboards. I've railed about the
| ambiguity of _selection_ vs. _movement_ before (see:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771672>), but Scott
| highlights additional nuances. Does a screen touch: place the
| cursor? bring up the menu? start a drag? start a double tap?
| start a long press?
|
| And what of when the user is disabled (Parkinsons, other
| motor/neuron disorder), tired, ill, drunk, in a moving vehicle
| (preferable _not_ as the driver /operator), juggling children
| (don't drop), or in any other way at less than 100% focus,
| attention, ability, and dexterity?
|
| I've had some variant of a smartphone or tablet since the mid-
| aughts. The two I've the fondest recollections of were the first
| (a Palm Centro, with a hardware keyboard) and my most recent
| (Onyx BOOX Max Lumi). Each has different strengths. The Centro
| was good for basic text entry, though its display was minimal.
| The BOOX is a large e-ink device which is excellent for reading
| _and_ has Termux (a Linux userland for Android) installed. With
| an external keyboard it 's passable local Linux system and can be
| used to SSH elsewhere, though the combined set is _not_ something
| that can be crammed into a pocket. Slides easily into my
| messenger bag though.
|
| As I'd listed out in table-form three years ago, there is _no_
| use-case for an emissive-display tablet for which it is superior
| to a different device, and the distinction is little changed for
| smartphones. Display + keyboard remains the ultimate productivity
| environment. For capability, privacy, and flexibility, I 'd
| prefer _separate_ audio, image /video, and comms devices, each of
| which individually can be quite small. Technological advances for
| each is slow enough that these need _not_ be replaced frequently
| (once a decade or more should be sufficient). The main driver of
| late has been storage capacity, though with 1 TB being now widely
| available, that 's no longer a driver for text, audio, or even to
| a large extent images, though video can of course consume
| prodigious storage.
|
| The privacy advantages of airgapped generative / capture tools,
| with a separate comms-capable device also seem increasingly
| advisable.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Yes text editing on mobile is really bad. But at least on
| Android, the OpenBoard keyboard helps a lot. Movement from the
| cursor and backspace.
| rumori wrote:
| I wonder if the author is aware of the cursor positioning
| gestures on iOS (hold space, then drag)
|
| I'm also not sure that the inline magnifier is such a good idea,
| he never gives an example with a fat finger overlaid, I think
| that would immediately show it's just not feasible.
|
| I'm also sure that Apple has dozens of user tests with all type
| of text editing strategies, Ken Kocienda even wrote a book about
| his process developing text input and auto-correct.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Proc...
| mpalmer wrote:
| He probably is aware, Android has the same gesture.
| colanderman wrote:
| I was not aware of this! This is a game changer for me, my
| single biggest complaint about text editing (which I was
| about to post here as something the authors missed) was that
| there's no means to perform fine cursor movement with
| gestures (I would expect the cursor to slow when the
| magnifying lens pops up). But apparently there is already a
| way!!
| calderknight wrote:
| I had never heard of this feature. This will be very useful.
| scottjenson wrote:
| I am aware ;-) It's certainly helpful. My point is that it's
| not nearly enough. The goal of this post was to make it clear
| that the entire model of mobile editing is flawed and it's
| helpful to rethink it. However, I'm all for anything that can
| help!
| gcanyon wrote:
| The problem is far from invisible (to me at least). A few months
| ago on HN I used text editing as an example of how iOS wasn't
| ready for "business" use. I can't find the comment now, but my
| memory is that I listed several of the issues listed in this post
| and said something like "Text creation/editing is core to the
| 'business', non-content-consumer use case. Apple needs to either
| acknowledge these problems and work to solve them, or admit they
| cannot solve them and stop pushing this narrative." It's
| especially telling that the author references Apple's 3D Touch as
| being an enabling technology here, when Apple shipped it without
| thinking of a valid use case for it, and then discontinued it
| after several years of still not thinking of a valid use case for
| it.
|
| It's interesting to me that Google had Tablet Tuesdays. One of
| the things I've said _many_ times is that it 's obvious when a
| company actually does the thing they're pressing users to do.
| Google obviously uses gmail, and just as clearly never used any
| of the social products they released. But I think Tablet Tuesdays
| doesn't accomplish the thing they hoped it would: if you can use
| a regular computer 4 days out of 5 -- or maybe 5 out of 6 :-(
| then you can limp along on that one day and not have enough
| incentive to actually solve the problems. "Tablet Tuesdays"
| should have been "Tablet Teams" -- whole groups of people forced
| to use _nothing_ but a tablet, with no way to hide from the
| problems that caused.
|
| Eloquent seems like an excellent existence proof that better is
| possible. Personally, I would try multi-touch gestures to solve
| some of the problems. It might be (okay, likely is) too complex a
| solution, but Apple (at least) can detect up to ten(?) separate
| touchpoints. That would be absurd, but I'd be curious to try
| copy/paste with multi-touch shortcuts. And it seems that
| selection might benefit from multi-touch as opposed to the
| (admittedly clever) pressure hack Eloquent is using.
| laurentlb wrote:
| > Google obviously uses gmail, and just as clearly never used
| any of the social products they released
|
| Employees use for example Gmail and Google Docs, and it's
| critical to their productivity.
|
| It can be hard to get the same feedback loop for other
| products. Some Google employees used Google+, but not that
| many, and they didn't need the same features as external users.
| And even if they complained internally about some things, it
| was not critical anyway.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Yep, docs is another example where it's clear google uses it
| internally.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I think it may be a pun since the cursor and the menus are
| invisible (or hard to see) under the problems described :-)
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| > _A few months ago on HN I used text editing as an example of
| how iOS wasn 't ready for "business" use. I can't find the
| comment now_
|
| Was it this one?
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36536203>
| gcanyon wrote:
| Yes! -- I'm curious if you had some efficient way to find
| that?
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Not a single mention of the biggest problem, by far, of text
| editing on Android: no undo?
|
| Fix that before literally anything else on Android, please.
|
| > too many people mistakenly see text editing as "done"
|
| I can't imagine anyone that uses both desktop and mobile to think
| mobile text editing doesn't need improvements.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > no undo
|
| It works fine, you just need a keyboard what would allow you to
| send Ctrl+Z.
|
| Yes, there should be a menu item (at least in a pop-up) too...
|
| BTW, there is a API to add your things to that pop-up (like for
| searching providers etc) so there is a chance you can make it.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| iOS has "shake to undo", which isn't perfect, but at least
| it's something.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| You can also do settings->accessibility->touch->back tap
| and set a single/double tap to send the 'shake' gesture.
| galad87 wrote:
| Or tap with three fingers to bring up the tools menu, or
| double-tab with three fingers to undo. Still a bit clunky.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's clunky, you look utterly ridiculous whilst doing it,
| but it is occasionally _very_ useful. I've found that the
| UI gets better about putting undo arrows everywhere,
| though. But then even that is not really elegant.
| overhead4075 wrote:
| E.g., Unexpected Keyboard has modifier keys and I can use it
| to enter Ctrl+Z on Android.
|
| And a lot of other shortcuts, too (cut, copy, paste, select
| all, home/end, etc).
| modeless wrote:
| Seriously, it is beyond ridiculous that the default keyboard
| doesn't have an undo button anywhere. Copy/paste take way too
| many taps too. I like the changes to cursor motion proposed in
| the article.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Emacs on termux from a Logitech K780 works great for me, the
| benefits of not being mouse dependent pay off in life more often
| than you might expect. Almost all the "editor" apps (foss only
| app user here) are subpar compared to using emacs/vim. Web apps
| are obviously the "in-between" without much of a solution. Also,
| I do miss my Blackberry KeyOne sometimes and have heavily
| considered some of the newer physical keyboard phones.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Is there a way I can download and run the demo on my own phone?
| It looks interesting but there seems to be no download links
| scottjenson wrote:
| I'm the author. As the code is owned by Google, I'm a bit
| constrained in sharing it. I've got permission to talk about
| the work and show it, but that's about it.
| sn41 wrote:
| By the way, a simple solution I have come across to make the
| experience slightly less painful: use an OTG adapter, and plug in
| a USB keyboard. Most offices/hotels etc have USB keyboards lying
| around, and the OTG adapter is a tiny device. This means that I
| can reply to emails when I am travelling, and I have found the
| experience satisfactory. It's not a truly mobile solution,
| though, since carrying a keyboard around yourself, is bulky.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go
| larodi wrote:
| maybe voice commands, will after all, catch up properly with LLMs
| now. but who really wants to talk to Her on a daily basis, I
| doubt to many sane people.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Text editing done right requires either a true keyboard to
| manipulate it, or true AI that understands every small nuance one
| might want to apply to a text. Unfortunately until AI catches up,
| the best tool we could use for text is a real keyboard, or a
| virtual one that doesn't suffer from the lack of usable space of
| mobile devices, which would probably make use of an external
| wearable, possibly BT connected, device. Years ago I thought of
| one shaped as an "ergonomic potato" that uses a few keys (3 or 4)
| and an accelerometer for hand orientation detection, so that one
| could use a mix of the key combination and hand position to
| rotate and find the right char/symbol on a virtual ball-printer-
| head-like "thing" shown on the screen. I never went beyond the
| "what if" stage; the contraption would probably work, but would
| also be too cumbersome to use.
| meatjuice wrote:
| It'd be interesting if there's a demo that everyone can try on
| the web. Not only in videos.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I miss the ability to move the cursor by sliding my finger on the
| space bar, not sure when it disappeared though.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > iOS doesn't have a teardrop handle but it's text cursor still
| has the same 'eat the tap' problem.
|
| You can just hold down the spacebar to move the cursor. I assume
| Android does this as well?
| pard68 wrote:
| Step back. Text /input/ on mobile isn't okay. It's a copy (for
| the most part) of desktop editors as well. There have been a few
| changes, such as dragging your finger around. A few keyboards
| have tried (and largely failed) to introduce new, mobile-first
| keyboards. It doesn't stick.
|
| I have used a number of non-qwerty/typewriter style mobile
| keyboards. I have landed on MessagEase, but really loved a few
| others. Thankfully MessagEase still works, most died somewhere in
| the mid 10s.
| eulgro wrote:
| The author made a demo app, surely this could be evolved into a
| library? I could give an option to users of my app to switch all
| text inputs to use this instead of the system's default.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| I wish there was a way to try that demo on my own device
| instead of just seeing it in videos
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Long-form text-editing on a phone is going nowhere for me. I
| can't even type in my phone-number without having to correct 3 or
| 4 mistakes. Basically, I can't use a phone for anything that
| involves free-form data entry.
|
| In practice, I only use the thing to receive SMS messages
| containing verification codes (which I can't receive on my
| laptop). The phone doesn't travel with me (i.e. it's not in fact
| mobile). It stays near the laptop, which also doesn't travel.
|
| My eyesight isn't that great these days. And I have a distinct
| sense that my fingers and thumbs have got fatter with age; one
| thumb covers three "buttons" on the virtual keyboard.
|
| You may say that I should get a bigger, more-modern fondleslab.
| But the buttons on the virtual keyboard are the same size on big
| fondleslabs as they are on my old one; they keep the keyboard as
| small as possible, so that app designers have more screen to play
| with.
| ilteris wrote:
| You cannot edit much on a virtual keyboard imo. That's where
| BlackBerry and sidekick excelled but and touch screens would
| always be subpar. It's a tradeoff.
| skyboo wrote:
| Ever tried editing the URL in the URL bar in iOS Safari? It's
| even worse than just editing as it involves horizontal scrolling
| in a tiny box. Why don't they expand the URL address bar to be a
| large text box when selected is beyond me.
| twic wrote:
| My peeve with the URL bar in Firefox on Android is that there's
| no way to partially select. A tap places the cursor, and a long
| press selects the whole URL. There's no way to select the
| domain, or a value from a query string, etc. Simply supporting
| the normal text editing gestures here would allow this, but the
| developers have gone out of their way to make it impossible.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Something I do quite often with FlorisBoard on Android is holding
| down shift and dragging the space bar to create a selection, just
| like I would with shift and the arrow keys on a desktop
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop
| text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse._
|
| Vim is usable, with Hacker's Keyboard (Android keyboard app that
| gives a full on-screen keyboard) or a Bluetooth keyboard.
|
| The Vim paradigm solves the problem of not having a mouse or menu
| bars, since it doesn't rely on them.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| Honestly, just learning that you can long press on the space bar
| to move the cursor around has fixed 95% of my mobile text editing
| woes.
| alesso_x wrote:
| Long press on space bar to move the cursor is great. Also iOS
| supports "Drag Press for text selection" which the article says
| it has implemented.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Why does this not mention long press on the spacebar on ios?
|
| It largely solves this problem.
|
| Long press on spacebar, keep it down and move around to move the
| cursor. While dragging tap with a second finger to start
| selection mode.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Problem is that that feature is not very discoverable. But I
| agree. The author seems very Android focused because most
| issues don't really exist for iOS users once you know how it
| works.
| jzb wrote:
| It's not discoverable. I learned about it through some
| "things you should know about iOS" listicle or something.
| Once I picked it up, I've used it a lot.
|
| I _loathe_ when apps interrupt usage to say "did you know
| you can?" but... this is one of those things where Apple
| _should_ point the feature out on upgrade, or something.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| Gboard has the spacebar drag too, though not the tap to
| select.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Cool! wasn't aware. Then it is even more relevant for the
| article to cover this.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Very true, I think that might be on purpose (it's an
| interesting topic https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ui-
| accelerators/).
|
| Do agree that this one is too hard to discover, Apple doesn't
| really highlight it at all, while it's so incredibly useful.
|
| Luckily there are all the engagement farmers with their ios
| tips and tricks, maybe that is the official Apple strategy
| haha, and to be fair it kinda works as people do find out
| that way.
| eastbound wrote:
| No, the force-touch spacebar is awful.
|
| It's only a few characters wide, so you can't edit large text
| in small input, such as... the URL, the most frequent usage of
| editing text on mobile. Along with tasks in the TODO app,
| typing a text message.
|
| It's only awful BECAUSE Apple is persuaded that we have fat
| fingers.
|
| But I have kept a very old iPad from the pre-force space bar,
| and lightly touching any word would simply put the cursor
| between letters. Modern-day iOS selects the full word as if I
| had fat fingers.
| codeptualize wrote:
| See https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WhLGEJ3sMNg
|
| You can drag around the whole screen btw. If you need to go
| further just hold your finger at the side of the screen and
| it will work as if you hold the arrow keys on a keyboard.
|
| I believe it also responds to velocity, so quick swipes will
| get you quite far.
|
| On iPad you can also do a two finger drag.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Please fix this. I mainly use my phone to write hn comments and
| it is already too much pressure on the current state of the
| typing experience for me. I could imagine myself doing all sorts
| of support and maintenance jobs from my phone if only I could
| interact better with code on it.
| wizofaus wrote:
| No mention of "undo"? That's usually my biggest bug bear, no way
| to undo accidentally deleted/garbled edits. Oh and the fact that
| intended deletion of half a sentence via backspace often ends up
| deleting far more than intended.
| kelchm wrote:
| Not sure about Android, but on iOS a three finger tap will
| bring up a contextual menu which allows undo and redo, among
| other actions.
| dfinninger wrote:
| Or just shaking your iPhone for undo.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I tried that with an iPad once - if there's a way to do so
| without looking faintly ridiculous I'm all ears. But I'm an
| Android person as far as phones go, lack of a standard
| system wise undo command isn't quite enough to send me back
| to Apple.
| harrisi wrote:
| I've been wondering what I'm supposed to do with my third
| thumb. /s
|
| I just tried using this in a text screen. My first attempt
| was on the keyboard which added random characters and brought
| up the little thing at the top to undo, my second attempt was
| above the keyboard, but my most recent message was a link so
| I got taken to safari, and my third attempt in a small sliver
| of the message screen in the upper left worked.
|
| Obviously if you're familiar with it, it's easier to do, but
| I rarely have three fingers available while I'm writing text
| on a phone.
| mro_name wrote:
| when I started designing mobile applications in 2009, I was fully
| convinced they are inept for (keyed) text entry. No one would
| type more than a few characters on such devices.
|
| Since I found me proven both wrong and right in some sense. Looks
| we rather sacrificed quality for immediate reaction and
| enthusiastically do bad text editing and sloppy writing on the
| go.
| johndhi wrote:
| Along these lines, I hate trying to upvote on hacker news. My
| finger usually almost clicks downvote and often does.
| chrnola wrote:
| This bit is no longer entirely accurate:
|
| > For highly proficient users, this gets even worse as their is
| no command key equivalents for cut, copy, or paste. [...] Part of
| the unspoken reason desktop clipboard use is so high is the speed
| in which it can be used. Mobile has none of this.
|
| I recently discovered [1] that iOS has several three-finger
| pinch/swipe gestures for copy, paste, cut, undo, and redo.
| Apparently these gestures were introduced in 2019/iOS 13 [2].
| While they are certainly not the easiest gestures to reliably
| perform, they at least do not suffer from the issues of ambiguity
| described by the author.
|
| [1]: accidentally, of course, because the discoverability of many
| features on mobile is quite poor
|
| [2]: https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/12/gestures-undo-ios-iphone-
| ipad...
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Even ripping the keyboard off my surface to save space etc, it
| feels crippling unless I'm watching or reading something
| passively.
|
| To a lesser extend, using a trackpad vice mouse. Or a controller
| in FPS games.
| nanna wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree with the author but don't think he's radical
| enough about solutions.
|
| Thumb-key takes a radical approach, and I've watched someone who
| has become comptetent at it (which i haven't) type elegantly on
| it.
|
| https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
|
| But I always wonder why noone has tried building a hardware chord
| keyboard for a phone. It seems perfectly suited.
| Phemist wrote:
| I tried this out for the past hour or so. It takes the 9 most
| common letters in English and makes them easily accessible
| through one touch down, whereas all the other letters require a
| touch+swipe.
|
| Multi-lingual support is problematic, the 9 most common letters
| differ per language, even if you stick to those based on a
| latin script. So either you end up learning multiple layouts
| for multiple languages, or end up doing way more touchswipes
| than should strictly be necessary.
|
| Granted, I am a pretty fast and accurate two-thumb typer on a
| qwerty keyboard (AnySoftKeyboard) on my phone, so it might not
| be for me. Perhaps someone who struggles more with accurately
| hitting individuals keys would benefit more from this
| simplified keyboard
| Phemist wrote:
| Point is, I doubt this system will ever be faster (for me)
| than typing on the qwerty keyboard where all keys are
| available at a single touch.
|
| I would also be interested if this method would improve my
| ability to type blind, but I think it still suffers from the
| lack of tactile feedback there, I still dont know where my
| finger is exactly.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I have used one, you are still stuck with the text entry UI
| widgets limitations.
|
| If you want to se PARTICULARLY bad examples, check out the
| social in-game example of harry potter magic awakened.
| zackproser wrote:
| While all the same issues highlighted in this post still apply
| the WYSIWYG editor I'm using in my project, this has been my side
| project take on rapidly iterating on blog posts from my mobile
| phone:
|
| https://youtu.be/Y36rUWeVnMM?si=yqwrOAanvSJ0fOEt
|
| It lets you combine speech to text and markdown editing.
|
| Partly for fun and practice and partly because it helps me to
| quickly commence new posts and either iterate on the go or return
| to the open PR when I'm back at my laptop.
| jll29 wrote:
| Writing/editing worked fine on my Blackberry. It's the people who
| introduced the glass surface keyboards that are the root of the
| editing evil.
|
| Cursor keys to edit, a scroll wheel to navigate one's inbox, it
| was a dream that "they" stole from us with RIM's demise.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm so much faster with touch than I ever was on my BB. But
| your comment made me realize how much I'd love a jog wheel
| where my right index finger rests (top right side) while my
| thumbs are typing. I'd use it for adjusting the cursor location
| or press in to select a word for replacement.
|
| Ooouhhh... imagining this already feels right.
| fisian wrote:
| My biggest problem in editing on mobile is changing a text
| selection (for example a long URL or long text paragraphs) that
| don't fit on screen at once.
|
| Once I have to scroll (vertically or, even worse, horizontally)
| in addition to moving the selection handles the UX is just
| terrible.
| laurentlb wrote:
| Came here to say the same: editing a URL is very painful. I
| wish I could use a multiline editor for the URL.
| failuser wrote:
| You can long-press spacebar on iOS to get a trackpad-like
| behavior. And you can tap somewhere else to even select like
| that. Awkward, but it works.
| deely3 wrote:
| I don't know about IPhone but on Android its simply impossible
| to Paste text between two words. You can't paste text into
| cursor position you can only replace selected text with Pasted
| text.
|
| Thats my main biggest issue.
|
| Also, why the fuck there no Copy/Paste buttons on mobile
| keyboard??
| xxs wrote:
| On android you need a bit better keyboard that has 'paste' as
| part of the keyboard. It does paste at the caret position
| Nyubis wrote:
| There are copy/paste buttons on Gboard, but they're kind of
| hidden. Press the 4 squares in the top left of the keyboard
| and select Text Editing. You get arrow keys, a button for
| toggling select, and cut/copy/paste. In a way it's like
| switching out of insert mode in vim.
| Pxtl wrote:
| It's actually gotten better since the clipboard key is in
| autocomplete bar in gboard now.
|
| If you have something in clipboard:
|
| 1. Place your cursor
|
| 2. Yes, I know you fat-fingered the exact position. Drag on
| spacebar to slide the cursor around (Holy crap this is the
| most non-discoverable feature).
|
| 3. Press the clipboard button to show clipboard menu (or, if
| the clipboard button isn't showing, use the 4-square menu to
| get it).
|
| 4. Paste the thing.
| efreak wrote:
| What if I don't want the keyboard _monitoring_ my
| clipboard? Nothing should be monitoring my clipboard. If I
| choose to paste from the clicked, at that point you can
| look at it, not before.
| scottjenson wrote:
| You actually can paste between words but it's hidden (like
| most things with mobile text editing) You need to place the
| text cursor between the words carefully, tap the 'teardrop'
| on the text handle, and that will bring up the menu to paste.
| (not saying that's good!)
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is to say you can't as several of those actions are
| impossible for humans to do with enough accuracy.
| mikelward wrote:
| Holding the spacebar makes moving to the correct location
| possible. Not easy, but possible.
|
| Edit: Ah, but then the teardrop goes away.
|
| So I guess not really a solution. Sorry.
| mikelward wrote:
| Thank you for teaching me this! Not very discoverable!
| cloudking wrote:
| Wow.. TIL you can tap the tear drop, thanks!
| exhilaration wrote:
| Lol, same here, I've been using Android since 2011 and
| had no idea it was trappable
| mikelward wrote:
| Just tried this. I find tapping to bring up the teardrop
| sometimes changes the cursor position.
|
| It's quite unfortunate the paste button is not always shown
| when editing. At least the teardrop (if not an edit bar)
| should be shown when using long press spacebar to move the
| cursor.
| [deleted]
| awinter-py wrote:
| I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you
| have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is
| a huge attention suck and kills my input speed
|
| On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen
| keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting
| 1 or 2 random words
|
| Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain
|
| while we're griping:
|
| - on an older android device the built-in keyboard is such a pig
| that it sometimes requires you to slow down to like 1 character
| per second. Note that this worked fine on a nexus 5 with aosp a
| million years ago, so it's not like it's not a solved problem
|
| - Swipe keyboard is in theory good, but the keyboard can't switch
| from swipe <-> tap smoothly enough and usually causes an error
|
| - droid has the ability to drag inside the spacebar to move the
| cursor, but the first time you do this, it inserts a word instead
| because it's confused about what mode it's in
| jameshart wrote:
| Typing is a separate problem. And if you want a physical
| keyboard on a mobile device you can actually have one. But that
| still won't solve _editing_.
|
| Editing on your blackberry was even clunkier than the touch
| affordances that this post is about - just cursor keys, right?
| Now, you might argue that if you can type fluently you won't
| need to edit as much - but the point here is about enabling
| mobile devices to be much more than just message input devices,
| but actually to do things like revise documents. You're not
| using text manipulation affordances just to correct typos but
| to make significant changes to existing bodies of text.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Though in fairness to awinter-py, given that _text entry_ is
| a simpler task than text _editing_ , if typing support is
| _already_ insufficient, editing won 't be any better.
|
| I'm typing this at a hardware keyboard on a desktop computer.
| I've had to make multiple short edits, mostly
| backspace/retype, as I enter this short comment. The fact
| that I can _look at the screen_ rather than have my attention
| focused on the keyboard is itself a huge benefit to writing.
|
| Using a touchscreen _literally makes me dumber_ in ways I
| cannot afford. Previously noted:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521911>.
| awinter-py wrote:
| yes 100% to your link
|
| in my experience all screen input has high cognitive
| workload
|
| (even _taps_ , because modern touch UX has small targets
| and unpredictable animation timing when you open a menu)
|
| US navy blamed touch input for a boat collision and swapped
| out some touchscreens for physical controls
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I find I almost always prefer using a stylus to a finger.
| That's the Onyx's pencil (previously as Staedler,
| unfortunately since broken). I can _see_ what I 'm
| tapping on with the stylus, positioning is far more
| precise, and it doesn't smudge the screen.
|
| It's still hell for text editing, however.
|
| _Unless_ I 'm doing actual handwritten note-taking,
| which might be another option.
| awinter-py wrote:
| no the blackberry had a physical trackball with toothy
| tactile feedback for motion and a mechanical click action
|
| you could scroll vertically and horizontally
|
| I don't remember if you could highlight, but there was a
| shift key so I'm assuming yes, and I vaguely recall double-
| tapping backspace for whole-world deletion
| corbezzoli wrote:
| You can disable autocorrect and get your old behavior. I don't
| understand this complaint. The only thing missing is _feeling_
| the keys, but this is completely fixable:
|
| > a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You can disable autocorrect, but then _you have also disabled
| swipe texting_ , which is much faster.
| MattRix wrote:
| I think autocorrect is overrated and actually makes the typing
| process much more annoying. Also I'm not sure if 55wpm is
| supposed to be fast or not? I just did a typing test
| (monkeytype.com) on my iPhone and got 80 wpm with 0 mistakes,
| and I don't use autocorrect.
| kmstout wrote:
| Earlier this year I spent some time with a Unihertz Titan
| Pocket, which sports a physical keyboard. It gave a vastly
| better typing experience than any other smartphone I've
| interacted with.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I still use Swype, the button to select the word the cursor is at
| is irreplaceable. No other keyboard I know of has it. There are
| also more suggestions and you can scroll them. Google's keyboard
| only shows 3, and two of them are basically the same with
| different capitalization. It's just horrible.
|
| The other benefit is that you can quickly copy/cut/paste/select
| all with a single swipe action (from the swipe button to the c,
| x, v, a keys respectively).
|
| There is just an single downside: no swipe on the space bar to
| move the cursor. But with another gesture you can turn the
| keyboard into an arrows one.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't know why there aren't any good keyboards. SwiftKey came
| close, but as it grew it became slower and slower and now it's
| just ossified and abandoned, with a few really annoying bugs
| that surely should have been easy to fix (like "forget this
| word" actually forgetting a word).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The fact the iOS delete button moves at snails pace then suddenly
| jumps to deleting words for about 4 words then suddenly starts
| deleting whole chunks of text. It's objectively trash and a
| nightmare to use when just ramping up single character delete
| speed alone would be an improvement.
|
| This is before we get into the silliness of autocorrect
| repeatedly autocorrecting the same thing when you delete it and
| retype it.
|
| Dread writing on mobile.
| n_ary wrote:
| Off-topic: I want to murder the person who removed the beautiful
| magnifying glass in iOS when manually dragging a text and
| replaced it with some garbage mini reticle that often bugs out
| and disappears if I am dragging on multi-line text >:(
| c-hendricks wrote:
| There's a special place in hell for WYSIWYG editors on mobile.
|
| It's less WYSIWYG and more "what you're getting is what we
| interpreted you wanting, good luck"
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As a side note, text editing on desktop also isn't okay.
| Especially in the browser era, the fact that the "do command"
| manipulation from text editors and the "do command" manipulation
| from control panels collided violently in the browser as an
| application mean that when I do a simple click and drag to select
| text, I have no idea what's going to happen. Will I select the
| text? Will I start dragging the link underneath the text? Is the
| text an image so I start dragging the image? Will I try to
| activate the button that the text is actually wrapped by?
|
| Browsers could honestly use a modifier (additional mouse button
| or key held down) that put them in a "text selection mode," in
| which all other meanings of click and click-drag are switched
| off. That would give the user full control to excerpt text from
| the page regardless of its context.
| Springtime wrote:
| Blackberry 10 had really nice text selection for their phones
| with physical keyboards. The keyboard itself doubled as a
| touchpad so one was able to double tap the physical keyboard
| anywhere in a text box to bring up a loupe and hold the virtual
| shift Shift key + drag one's fingers along the surface of the
| keyboard left/right/up/down to highlight text (dragging the
| selection handles via the screen was also possible but the
| keyboard method was faster).
|
| It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and
| didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or
| handles.
|
| I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.
| scottjenson wrote:
| That seems like a simple idea to test in a keyboard (well the
| loupe might be hard) but moving the cursor and using SHIFT to
| select are fairly easy. Who's working on an Android keyboard
| here? ;-)
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| I guess I'm the only one to use SwiftKey keyboard with arrows to
| move the cursor?
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-di...
|
| Edit: fixed link
| falcolas wrote:
| Your link is 404ing for me.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Fixed
| catbird wrote:
| Yeah I use swiftkey with the arrows and number row. Also I have
| it set up so the keyboard appears in the middle of the screen
| where my thumb can actually reach. I have no idea how anyone
| can use one of today's giant phones one-handed with the default
| keyboard.
|
| Reading this article I realized I didn't even know how to cut
| and paste on android, and I'd long ago resigned myself to
| deleting and retyping.
| Eduard wrote:
| Biggest fail on Android IMHO: you cannot paste _within_ a word.
|
| copy and paste should be dedicated soft buttons, at least as long
| presses.
| twic wrote:
| Yes you can. Tap to place the cursor, tap on its fat tail to
| get a context menu, select paste.
| colanderman wrote:
| You definitely can with recent GBoard versions. If something is
| in the clipboard, tapping somewhere (including within a word)
| to move the cursor brings up a paste button in the prediction
| bar.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but when dragging the handler, specially on a
| selection, it often moves after releasing the finger, it's
| infuriating.
| twic wrote:
| Same. But I get this on desktop too, with a trackpad. Makes
| precision selection when image editing very frustrating.
|
| It would be nice if there was a simple and universal way to do
| this interaction more precisely!
| LightMachine wrote:
| Watched and read it all and find it amazing work. Text editing on
| mobile is embarassingly terrible and the proposals presented are
| very solid. Props to the author.
| bmacho wrote:
| Use a keyboard app with arrows. My choice is "Hacker's keyboard"
| [0] but I think there are others. (Search reddit for best
| keyboards with arrows.) I can't say more about it, text editing
| is not a problem on mobile. It's ok. I installed, then I forgot.
|
| [0]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Hacker's keyboard
|
| My updoots for it. I think it's already a decade I use it
| exclusively on any Android platform.
|
| Sadly soon enough it would break completely, because Android is
| constantly mangl^W changing.
| ctenb wrote:
| Can't run it on newer Android versions
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Which, specifically?
|
| I'm still using Hacker's Keyboard on Android 10.
|
| Though I'm also largely relying on F-Droid for apps. Is
| Hacker's Keyboard not _installable_ via Google Play, or not
| _runnable_?
| rjh29 wrote:
| Samsung keyboard has a hard to find "Text editing" tab with
| arrows.
| originate wrote:
| Two Suggestions:
|
| 1) I use the arrows in my keyboard to move the cursor. (Or
| letters in vi) Consider four new buttons to be able to move
| around once the cursor is active.
|
| 2) Love this concept. Editing this very post is too hard. This is
| a big change. Put together the progressive UI that adopts these
| changes over time. Do the research on user adoption and least
| impact. Move this from idealist end state, to practical sequence
| of steps to get there.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Not having a global menu is a terrible hindrance. Understandable
| with the original iPhone screen size, but definitely not today
| with the phablets we all carry.
|
| I also want multiple undo everywhere and consistently like any
| decent desktop.
| livrem wrote:
| I mostly just use emacs in termux. I think vim makes more sense
| to be honest, since the modal edit mode is perfect for touch
| screens, but I do not know it well enough. Keyboard-combos in
| emacs are not great without a real keyboard, but at least I know
| what to press and it is often possible to navigate around using
| very few key-presses with some thinking and things like avy-mode.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Is a case for disruption:
|
| > Text editing on mobile was considered "good enough." Since
| people weren't complaining, there was little motivation to
| improve it.
|
| Put it another way, "make things better" just because they can be
| made better.
| guestbest wrote:
| I wonder what text editor apps are excellent examples of
| efficient mobile text editing. Does anyone know?
| mFixman wrote:
| It seems like a complicated solution to a reasonable problem.
|
| Text editing involves a pop-up keyboard. Why not add a menu with
| arrow keys, selection toggles, and copy/cut/paste there?
| eviks wrote:
| Nice effort to fix the broken fundamentals, though this doesn't
| go far enough.
|
| Why no customizable menu buttons? Good note editing apps like
| Bear on iOS have them, and predictable position makes choice
| faster/more precise vs a near-cursor popup
|
| A selection undo stack (and action undo tree stack) would also
| help in fixing mistapping and other mistakes
|
| And maybe modal editing paradigm could also be a good source of
| learning?
|
| Also fully customizable keyboards would help in text editing
|
| (don't like their proposed animation , seems like distracting
| noise, though maybe in actual use it's not bad)
| asah wrote:
| would it help to have a cellphone case with embedded keyboard?
|
| (pop your phone into the case if you anticipate work session(s) )
| wizofaus wrote:
| Surely it's going to need hardware innovations (e.g the ability
| to "roll out" a larger keyboard) for text editing on mobile
| devices to even come close to the desktop computing experience?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I was slightly surprised by the author's example experiments.
| Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common
| editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to
| just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is
| more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from
| the middle of words, I think that's fine. It seems pretty
| important to have the tests be realistic or their results won't
| relate much to the real world.
|
| It is possible to connect a keyboard to a phone though obviously
| this is a bit silly. But it does seem obvious that people don't
| care that much about the text-editing experience. And iPhones
| tried being better at text editing and apple dropped those
| changes, so it does seem they at least didn't feel the change was
| worth it:
|
| - you used to be able to select a word and pressing shift would
| toggle the suggested correction between regular, capitalised, and
| uppercase. That feature was dropped
|
| - with the pressure-sensitivity feature, you could press on the
| keyboard to turn it into a kind of touch-pad for moving the
| cursor, this meant your finger didn't get in the way of the text
| so you could see where the cursor was going. You could press
| harder to begin a word-by-word selection then move to select more
| or press harder to upgrade to sentence/paragraph selection. Apple
| got rid of the pressure-sensitive screens in newer phones and
| give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn't allow
| for selection (as far as I know) and makes it hard to move the
| cursor down.
| scottjenson wrote:
| Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the
| whole point was to see how easy it was to target.
|
| As to your "it does seem obvious that people don't care that
| much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the
| type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in
| the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a
| problem. However, _if_ you believe that mobile will replace
| desktop, then you 've got a problem as sophisticated text
| composition is quite hard on mobile.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| There is this website, nngroup.com that used to be a popular
| reference on UX matters. They wrote lots of articles about
| how they tested using computers by mouse instead of keyboard
| and that mousing was loads better and had wide-ranging
| conclusions about UX from this. But the studies turned out to
| have actually been things like 'replace all letter 'e's in
| this sentence with '|' symbols' and using the keyboard meant
| arrow keys and backspace rather than using a find-and-replace
| function. So sure, mice are better than cursor keys at
| selecting lots of letter 'e's and editing them, but one would
| hope that such a description is not representative of actual
| computer use and so not a good foundation on which to base
| general UX conclusions.
|
| It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario
| described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so
| implicitly optimising for) things that don't matter, one is
| potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things
| that do matter without helping things that don't.
|
| More realistic scenarios could be:
|
| - successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker
| news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people
| but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical
| mobile text-input mechanisms struggle.
|
| - edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs.
|
| - reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity.
|
| - add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this
| right now).
|
| I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does
| seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My
| reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this
| article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but
| people didn't particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped
| 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its 'killer
| app'.
|
| [1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online
| but I think the complaint is quite niche.
| bluGill wrote:
| As a bad speller I can assure you deleting from the middle of a
| word is a very common task.
| mitemte wrote:
| I just realised you can long press space to enable moving the
| cursor, then tap the keyboard with another finger to toggle
| selection mode on.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn't
| allow for selection
|
| If you put a second finger on the keyboard when you're doing
| long-press-space, it'll do selection _but_ it 'll stop when you
| lift your finger off space (if you've run out of display when
| selecting downwards) and won't pick up where you left off - you
| have to move to the little selection handles instead.
|
| Handy for small selections, I guess?
| aranchelk wrote:
| > Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption.
|
| They weren't and then they were. Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry were
| all devoting around half their user-facing surface area to
| content creation with physical keyboards.
|
| Near then end Nokia did make some really nice Linux-powered slide
| out keyboard devices. Best of both worlds if not for their
| thickness.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And before Palm had a keyboard, it had Graffiti, which could
| share screen space with display.
|
| It took a short period of training but was actually quite good.
| Far better than onscreen keyboards.
|
| I wouldn't recommend Graffiti for, say, trying to access a
| Linux shell. But for writing text, and editing it, it was
| serviceable in ways that current touchscreen devices aren't.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Positioning the cursor on Android is a complete disaster. I
| remember it not being a great experience on iOS, and being
| shocked when I moved to Android and found out it could be even
| worse. But I'm even more surprised that in all these years it
| hasn't been fixed. I hope this matter gains some visibility and
| traction.
|
| In the meantime if anyone knows a good "Graffiti" app keyboard
| for me to try out feel free to recommend.
| manbash wrote:
| There is nothing quite like the experience of text editing on
| mobile with RTL languages.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Or maybe mobile is not the correct platform for editing?
|
| This sounds like arguing that a hammer makes a terrible
| screwdriver.
| hackernewds wrote:
| "maybe mobile is not the correct platform for web browsing"
| demondemidi wrote:
| We've all seen what happens when engineers try to do UI/UX.
| Maybe you're an engineer and not a designer, and maybe stay
| in your lane and leave usability to the people who, ya know,
| study it?
| underseacables wrote:
| My takeaway is tacit irritation at the size of the screen. If it
| were larger then it would be easier to position a cursor and edit
| a word. With a keyboard and mouse, of course, it would be very
| easy. Our fingers are pretty large compared to smartphone
| screens, and regrettably that can only be helped with a stylus
| you'll lose.
| dhbradshaw wrote:
| Could have a track pad on the back of the phone
| qntmfred wrote:
| most people use phone cases
| worthless-trash wrote:
| The case would not cover the touch pad.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| That's their own loss
| superkuh wrote:
| Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart
| phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except
| for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do
| things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to
| use a real computer.
| mcronce wrote:
| If slide-out keyboards were still a thing they wouldn't be
| nearly as bad but we had to get rid of those because being
| thinner is the most important thing in the world
| postmodest wrote:
| And then because on screen keyboards suck so bad we had to
| make phones BIGGER which meant they needed to be THINNER
| which meant cameras needed to stick out, and here we are, in
| a world where an iPhone Pro Max takes up the full height of
| my jeans pocket and digs into my hip when I sit down. Yeyyy.
| robinson7d wrote:
| iPhone mini was a thing for a while. It still has the stuck
| out camera but otherwise only a bit larger than the iPhone
| 5 from 9 years earlier. I wish they hadn't ended it on the
| 13, because I also feel phones are getting too large.
| fragmede wrote:
| Or, there just isn't the market for a current gen mini
| and an SE.
| robinson7d wrote:
| That's for sure why it was discontinued. I'm sad it's
| gone, but I do understand I'm a minority in that feeling.
|
| I was just offering it as a counter point (from as recent
| as last year) to the onscreen keyboards necessitating
| huge phones that the comment I replied to was suggesting.
| Plus an option that is still modern enough to use. Using
| the mini keyboard isn't much worse than the pro. It's
| feasible, these minis type well, I don't think it's the
| reason for bigger, thinner phones with cameras popping
| out. I'd blame content more.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Don't think I'd even need a full keyboard. I had a _much_
| easier time writing on my old Nokia 3310 or similar than I
| 've ever had on my newfangled "smart" phone (it's quite
| dumb).
| hackernewds wrote:
| Reductive argument.
|
| Smartphones are way better platforms for something like TikTok
| or Twitter than desktop. Or an alarm clock app
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Strong agreement: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c
| 403edb013918e100...>
|
| (Largely targeted at tablets, though it also applies largely to
| smartphones, and has a specific comparison including them.)
|
| Even a minimal notebook computer vastly exceeds _any_
| smartphone or tablet.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The input is low bandwidth. It's communication with thumbs.
| graemep wrote:
| I recently bought a PineTab2. Its a pretty rough around the
| edges experience (hardware is fine, but Plasma Mobile is still
| lacking compared to Android) BUT with the case with a keyboard
| it is far better for writing anything. Not as good as my
| desktop, but a lot better than most mobile devices.
|
| I usually use Whatsapp web and the Signal desktop app at my
| desktop when I want to write more than sentence or two. A
| physical keyboard makes it so much easier. For example, I left
| making my comments here today until I sat down at my desktop.
|
| If you must use a phone for typing more than a tiny bit, buy a
| keyboard for it. Even a little bluetooth keyboard is a lot
| better.
|
| I am tempted by phones with keyboards. I used to have a
| Blackberry a long time ago and there are Android phones in
| similar formats.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Yearly reminder that Nokia perfected the slideout keyboard on
| their N900 model over 10 years ago
| asimovfan wrote:
| Also there was an actual linux distribution in it, Maemo.
| You could do things with it.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Maemo is still actively developed thanks to the
| fanatical/fantastic community around it.
|
| https://maemo-leste.github.io/
| mhb wrote:
| My saw is a bad hammer.
| tgv wrote:
| But you wouldn't complain you can't use a saw to drive nails
| in the wall, would you?
| mhb wrote:
| Exactly. It would be like complaining that a phone isn't a
| good tool for text editing.
| harlanji wrote:
| I've been using a little $220 laptop for the past 15 months or
| so. Wasn't even the cheapest one at the nearby big box store.
| Way cheaper than most smart phones. In that time I've learned
| Python and made like 20 apps, done all the job applications and
| Google Voicing I've needed to do. I don't even have a working
| mobile phone anymore.
|
| Plenty of battery life, like 6 hours on full bright. Not hard
| to find ways to plug it in, draws like 20W from my Jackery 160
| which is the smallest model yet big enough to charge it a few
| times. The computer is not much bigger than a big iPad. I just
| have a little backpack to carry it in, too small to look
| homeless (tho I am homeless).
|
| Not that my experience will change the opinion of mobile
| addicts. It's an IYKYK kinda thing (if you know you know).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| They are much, much better for photos. I will even say they are
| better for most videos chats.
|
| They are better music players. They are better GPS nav systems.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > They are better GPS nav systems.
|
| Android even supports access to raw pseudorange data from the
| GNSS chipset now. Today's phones support all the
| constellations and new technology like GPS L5. There's even a
| way to turn off things like duty cycling to maximize accuracy
| at the expense of battery consumption. Should be possible to
| set up centimeter precision relative positioning with these
| things.
| superkuh wrote:
| They're better for some types of photos. For example, you'd
| never want to take a photo of something you'd want to measure
| quantitatively with a smart phone. They hallucinate all the
| detail.
| mrob wrote:
| They are better for taking photographs simply because they're
| smaller, but for every other aspect of photo viewing,
| management, and editing, they are worse. They have a tiny
| screen, insufficient local storage and compute, and no
| keyboard or mouse.
|
| They're not better music players. Sound quality can be
| identical because phones support USB DACs, but again,
| everything else is worse. On a real computer I can easily
| search my library just by typing. There's no way to find
| specific tracks that fast on mobile.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > insufficient local storage
|
| My phone has 128gb. How is that not enough for photo
| editing?
| mrob wrote:
| Raw photographs are tens of megabytes each, and it's not
| unusual to take hundreds per session.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Agreeing and amplifying: Taking a random search result,
| the Canon EOS R5 has a 45 MP sensor: <https://www.usa.can
| on.com/shop/p/eos-r5?color=Black&type=New>
|
| Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 Giga _bit_ (128 MB)
| _per image_ , or ~1,000 images on 128 GB storage.
|
| Dedicated cameras have removable storage and professional
| photographers will carry multiple 500 GB -- 1 TB+ storage
| cards, swapping them out through a shoot.
|
| I'll note that the iPhone 15 Pro specs list a 48 MP
| sensor, which is similar, though storage tends to be as
| jpeg rather than raw. Compression varies but sizes of 1/2
| to 1/15 RAW at high quality are common.
|
| _Edit:_ Corrected GB - > Gb. Bytes are 8 bits.
| mrob wrote:
| >Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 GB per image
|
| 1Gb, not GB. And in practice it's not that high. Most
| digital cameras use a Bayer filter, with the pixel count
| specified as the number of grayscale pixels behind the
| individual filter elements. Raws are most often 12 or 14
| bits per pixel, so about 68MB or 79MB for a 45MP sensor.
| This can be further reduced with lossless compression.
| Still a lot for a 128GiB phone, though.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Gah! Thanks, corrected above.
|
| Thanks for the additional detail, I'd wondered about the
| bpp and individual colour-sensing elements.
|
| Point remains that RAW images are _large_.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I generally agree with you and the parent post. But touch
| screen is the best UI for photo cropping. This is awkward
| because it makes me want to split editing tasks between
| devices.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Better than a Wacom tablet?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I think they are also great for photo viewing, because they
| are easy to show to others. As the saying goes the best
| camera you have is the one you have with you.
|
| Same reason I listed them as the best music players - I
| don't want to carry around a laptop to hear tunes. And
| while some audiphiles claim that they can hear a
| difference, I have never seen evidence that this is the
| case.
| mrob wrote:
| If you EQ your headphones, e.g. to match the Harman
| curve[0] to better replicate the sound of loudspeakers in
| a moderately treated room, you'll probably find they need
| a lot of bass boost. This means you have to turn
| everything down to avoid clipping, which hurts the signal
| to noise ratio. If you only listen to low dynamic range
| music you still might not notice it, but for high dynamic
| range music, like orchestral music with natural sounding
| mastering, you will probably be able to hear noise from
| low quality DACs in the quiet parts.
|
| Fortunately, good DACs are cheap now, e.g. the Apple USB
| to 3.5mm adapter [1].
|
| [0] https://headphonesaddict.com/harman-curve/
|
| [1] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?th
| reads/r...
| bee_rider wrote:
| The smartphone is the second best device for pretty much
| every task. For the vast majority of things, in which we're
| not specialists, they are pretty good.
| bluGill wrote:
| They are better readers as well. Often reading is followed by
| some form of writing though and then they are terrible.
| brookst wrote:
| Indeed. They are also better (virtual) tape measures,
| contactless payment devices, crash/fall detectors, emergency
| rescue summoners, and, yeah, phones.
|
| Turns out different form factors are better at different
| things.
| larodi wrote:
| let's say only large few lines of text are okay, and some
| images are... okayis. everything else is a magnificent display
| of massive UI failure, sadly it took us 20 years to actually
| start talking about this seriously.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| One of the most important watersheds in my career, was reading
| Jenson's _The Simplicity Shift_ [0], many moons ago.
|
| It was written pre-iPhone, and talked about the brutal
| necessity of reducing mobile UX to the very barest essentials.
|
| I find that I am revisiting a lot of this stuff, when writing
| Apple Watch apps.
|
| [0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads the
| entire booklet as a PDF)
| scottjenson wrote:
| This is a lovely thing to read on a Sunday morning, thank
| you!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No, thank YOU!
|
| [EDIT] And, since I have you on the horn, There seems to be
| a PDF error, where the first page (The Challenge) is
| repeated twice.
| scottjenson wrote:
| oooh, interesting! I'll check it out, thanks!
| nameless_me wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this work. I look forward to reading
| it.
| prng2021 wrote:
| What an absolutely lazy assessment of technology. I'd say using
| those two appendages we call legs to move around while still
| being able to do many things you use a desktop computer for is
| a revolutionary piece of technology.
|
| Do you really want to carry a Walkman around along with a
| backpack with a Rand McNally map to guide you so you don't get
| lost in a neighborhood you've never visited? Maybe watch a
| portable DVD player on your way to/from work on the subway to
| pass the time? Carry some quarters so you can call someone at a
| pay phone or pay for a parking spot?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > I'd say using those two appendages we call legs to move
| around while still being able to do many things you use a
| desktop computer for is a revolutionary piece of technology.
|
| The above poster did acknowledge that smartphones absolutely
| win out in portability.
|
| Obviously you're stuck with mobile UIs for things like
| navigation, directions, location information, and a lot
| review apps, ordering a car, etc. Consequently, the user
| experience for those things is often _better_ on a mobile
| phone than it would be on a desktop (if a desktop UI is even
| provided)
|
| For anything involving typing more than an address, you're
| almost always better off with a Desktop application. There's
| nothing "lazy" about pointing this out
| prng2021 wrote:
| > Obviously you're stuck with mobile UIs for things like
| navigation, directions, location information, and a lot
| review apps, ordering a car, etc
|
| The "etc" in your statement could be expanded to 100
| additional useful things in everyday life. Given that, how
| can you agree with their original posters statement that
| mobile devices are terrible for everything except
| portability? It's such a ridiculous understatement.
| chunk_waffle wrote:
| My "phone" is really just a camera+GPS that my wife sometimes
| calls me on when she can't find me in a store. I dread typing
| on it, hell I dread _talking_ on it even.
| thih9 wrote:
| Sliders are okay.
|
| Editing photos in lightroom mobile works fine. Interfaces that
| are about swiping and sliding - from match 3 games, through
| tinder, to scrolling feeds - are very responsive.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| It's an interesting take. I had to stop and think for a second
| "is there anything I prefer a phone for", and yeah the only
| positive of using a phone (for me) is portability and multi
| functionality (being a de facto camera/camcorder/recorder).
| n_ary wrote:
| > but they really are terrible computers
|
| except for bottom-of-the-barrel androids, most drcent
| smartphones cost equivalent to a decent computer. I refuse to
| accept the garbage UX on an equivalent device which charges me
| such money and then dumb it down with tracking and ad
| shenanigans over usefulness.
|
| P.S. My own opinion and it is very OK to 150% disagree with me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Smartphones are just for when you 're literally unable to
| use a real computer._
|
| Which is literally extremely frequent, since we often need to
| do stuff on the go. Which is why an article like this is so
| important -- we should improve, not give up. There's no reason
| to think text editing on a phone has reached its final form.
| superkuh wrote:
| The reason I think it won't get much better is that the size
| of smart phones will not change. It is size that's really the
| issue for text editing. No space for a real keyboard, no
| space for a real display.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Current mobile keyboards and screens are pretty much fine
| -- I have no issues with text input on a phone or with
| reading.
|
| The problems are with _editing_ only -- precise cursor
| positioning, precise selection, and then access to basic
| cut /copy/paste/undo operations that doesn't mess
| everything up.
|
| My hunch is that we need a button on mobile keyboards to
| switch to a kind of "edit gesture mode". Some kind of swipe
| area to move the cursor, some kind of swipe area/mode to
| extend/contract a selection, some method to handle
| scrolling as necessary, some kind of magnifying zoom to
| select tiny things like narrow punctuation, and separate
| larger button areas for cut/copy/paste/undo. Maybe instead
| of swipes there are gestures in a kind of dedicated
| trackpad-type area of the screen, I don't know.
|
| But I definitely think there's a ton of area for
| experimentation that hasn't been explored yet. The hold-
| spacebar-to-turn-keyboard-into-trackpad-to-move-cursor mode
| was a first step the iPhone took towards this, but I think
| it can go 20x further.
|
| I think it's something that only Apple and Google are
| capable of developing right now though. I don't think there
| are enough API's exposed for third-party keyboards to
| directly control things like text selection, zoom,
| scrolling, cut/copy/paste/undo, and the like.
| fragmede wrote:
| Looking at wordle's mobile interface, where the keyboard
| is a part of the webpage, I think a lot could be done to
| demo new technologies.
| myk9001 wrote:
| Maybe we can look at it as an opportunity for inventing a
| fundamentally different approach to text editing on mobile?
|
| In another topic on HN people are discussing how software
| gets more bloated over time, because throwing more powerful
| hardware at a problem is easier than optimizing the
| software.
|
| As mobile devices aren't likely to get much bigger or get
| equipped with a mouse and keyboard anytime soon -- in other
| words, we don't seem to have a hw solution -- isn't it the
| perfect moment to try something novel and different?
|
| Sure, it isn't a given someone will come up with a great,
| new approach soon enough. Still seems worth it looking at
| this as an opportunity.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| There are novel approach ideas. I have many of them, and
| even saw a few implemented. The problem is, any
| sufficiently comfortable text entering/editing experience
| requires a non zero amount of training, which,
| considering the consumption devices smartphones are,
| discouraging for the average user. I believe in the end
| TTS with LLMs win and speaking in public to text will be
| accepted as a norm. Because it is literally the easiest
| possible experience bar brain implants.
| silisili wrote:
| I really miss form factors like the BB Priv or Moto
| Backflip.
|
| Now that 'work from anywhere' seems more prevalent than a
| decade+ ago, I wonder if such a design could find enough
| success in today's environment.
| ghusto wrote:
| I remember the first Android phone. It was small, and had a
| real keyboard. It's not that it can't be done, it's that
| it's cheaper to not have one, and they can get away with it
| because of the lowest common denominator consumer.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| The G1! (Or HTC Dream, depending on your locale.) It had
| a keyboard, touchscreen, and a trackball to boot.
|
| You weren't kidding about it being small, though--in
| hindsight the 320 x 480 screen resolution was a bit
| rough.
| dTal wrote:
| You can buy quad core x86 "laptops" - real computers - the
| size of a phone. How much more "on the go" do you need?
| xxs wrote:
| I have stuff to do I carry a 17" laptop with a full size
| keyboard. Else I'd just have better things to do.
| oslem wrote:
| There was a company, Tactus, who developed a touch screen that
| had little physical bumps pop out of the screen to represent your
| keyboard. I've always wondered why it never caught on, but I'm
| sure the technology came with a host compromises. Anyhow, it
| always seemed like a neat idea. Perhaps it would even allow for a
| denser button arrangement, giving users their arrow keys back.
|
| In other news, I typed this on my phone, having to edit parts of
| it, and failing to simply drag my cursor to the end!
| imhoguy wrote:
| That could be sorted out cheaply with screen protector with
| such bumps, or just cheap adhesive door silencers
| https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fvku2/found_anothe...
| lbotos wrote:
| Apple had a solid solution with 3d touch -- press a little bit
| harder and it was near instant jump to right
| position/highlight. I felt much faster inputting on my iPhone
| then. I miss it every day.
| alexeldeib wrote:
| Doesn't this still exist? You Force Touch the space bar and
| get a cursor
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It used to be pressure sensitive, which made it much faster
| to respond.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch
|
| > Haptic Touch is a feature on the iPhone XR (but not the
| iPhone XS) and later iPhone models replacing 3D Touch. The
| touchscreen, which no longer has a pressure sensitive
| layer, distinguishes between a tap and a long-press using a
| timed delay to activate certain 3D Touch features (only
| ones for elements that do not have an action assigned to
| long press). This feature was added to the iPhone SE (1st
| generation) with the iOS 13 update and to any iPad capable
| of running iPadOS 13. As of watchOS 7, only Haptic Touch is
| recognized, and Force Touch is discontinued on all
| subsequent Apple Watches.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| As of this week, they made it fast again.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It can never be as fast as with the real pressure
| sensors; it still has to be able to determine between a
| tap and a hold.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Yep, but it doesn't feel like a delay now.
| lbotos wrote:
| If I'm remembering correctly the main difference is that it
| was _fast_ -- the space bar cursor is fine but I do feel
| like I lost something that made my input on mobile better.
|
| Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I
| press slightly harder.
|
| Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I
| press and wait.
|
| iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but
| with 3d touch I was much faster.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| When in an input field, you simply tap to place the
| cursor. _If_ you need finer placement you use the
| spacebar. The tap works 90% of the time since you're
| usually editing whole words.
|
| Also, iOS has kept a software implementation of force
| touch around, even after removing the hardware: a hard
| press goes directly into cursor placement, it takes a bit
| more force than it used to. I imagine it's a mix of
| gyroscopes and detecting a growing touch surface.
| teolandon wrote:
| Just tried this a bit on a 14 Pro and a hard press and a
| soft press have no difference in how long it takes to
| enter force touch.
| felipemesquita wrote:
| 3D Touch capable models (6s to x) had actual pressure
| sensors embedded in the screen assembly, which meant there
| was another input channel (how hard you pressed) that apple
| mapped to an extra commands, like a right click. To
| highlight text with it, you could press slightly harder
| anywhere on the keyboard and that would start cursor
| movement mode (like holding on the spacebar on newer
| models), then, with the cursor on the word you wanted to
| start highlighting from, you pressed a bit harder and it
| would highlight from that word on until you released the
| keyboard.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes. It's a long press, though, not 3D Touch or whatever
| they used to call it. Admittedly this got much better with
| the new shorter delay to activate long press in iOS 17.
|
| It's restricted to the space bar, too. IIRC it was much
| better on my old 6S.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I wonder if there is a way to unboil the frog and introduce
| features in a backwards compatible way.
|
| One way could be to implement some or all of this along with
| changes to Android's "spacebar drag" cursor movement mode.
| Currently it can only move left and right unlike Apple's touchpad
| approach. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like you could
| implement a lot of the features through a keyboard touchpad while
| keeping regular editing clunky but familiar. By expanding on an
| otherwise very limited feature it might be welcomed by power
| users without depriving anyone of their existing workflow and
| muscle memory.
|
| One problem that comes to mind is that people are used to
| selecting from beginning to end and triggering the interaction
| from the bottom of the screen gives very little area go down
| while keeping 1:1 movement of the cursor. It could be solved by
| having the cursor hit the "roof" until the users finger matches
| the translated position then switch to a scrolling mode at the
| edges.
| scottjenson wrote:
| I'm the author. I agree, this could be a good way to do it.
| It's what I meant by a "slow burn" in the post. For example,
| just start with improvements to tapping and dragging, then add
| a better magnifier, etc. Just getting rid of some of these
| ambiguous bugs would be helpful.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Arrow and modifier keys, problem solved. If we're going to keep
| making the screens ridiculously huge, use the space for
| functionality instead of gimmicks.
| shiomiru wrote:
| I've been using Hacker's Keyboard in compact mode for years now
| for this reason. (And my screen is pretty small for today's
| standards.)
|
| It's just so much easier to edit text with arrow keys, shift-
| select, ctrl-c/x/v, etc. than getting that teardrop handle to
| behave, even on a touchscreen.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text
| editing, I'm usually met with blank stares_ [...long and detailed
| description of the problems and how their research attempts to
| solve them...] _Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent
| would be challenging._
|
| What a strange attitude to take! What's the point of the research
| if it's not aimed at shipping anything?
|
| Hopefully this is just a miscommunication and isn't meant to be
| as passive-aggressive as it sounds.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >What's the point of the research if it's not aimed at shipping
| anything?
|
| research!
| karaterobot wrote:
| This reminds me of a really cool talk about cursors:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76b3c_ssyPQ&t=181s
|
| It's a long video but the segment I mean is only a few minutes,
| and it's really fascinating if you're interested in people having
| to work out surprisingly hard, invisible problems.
| graycat wrote:
| "Editing"? My most important computing application is KEdit, a
| terrific text editor.
|
| Mobile? Since it seemed like highly inferior computing, I delayed
| getting one. Finally I did. Tried to do some little thing, and
| for four hours the fake keyboard came and went for no good
| reason, several times had to power off the device and log in
| again.
|
| Conclusion: I hate that mobile device.
|
| Result: I put the thing in a Faraday cage envelope and put that
| in a box in my car. I hope never to use it. My only intended use
| is to contact 911 in an emergency, and I hope never to have one
| of those.
|
| To me, _mobile_ is a big step backwards and very unwelcome.
|
| I'm putting up with Windows 10 Home Edition but ASAP returning to
| Windows 7 Professional. Most important application -- KEdit.
|
| Theme in computing: Mostly just text, in files, in the Windows
| hierarchical file system. Next, macros for KEdit. Next, command
| line scripts in Rexx. Next, software in the Microsoft .NET
| version of Visual Basic.
|
| Main use of computing: My startup and its Web site. I have the
| Web site code, 100,000 lines of typing, all from KEdit, all in
| .NET Visual Basic, running, apparently as intended.
|
| Latest Irritation from Mobile: Wanted to order some Chinese food
| for _pick up_. Used their Web site. The site assumed I had a
| mobile phone. So, couldn 't order via the site and had to call
| the Chinese restaurant and give me order to a person, item by
| item.
|
| The assumption of mobile for the Web site ruined the on-line
| ordering and much of the site.
|
| The site was complicated and in the end all they needed was one
| page of HTML. That one page could easily be plenty good, and even
| a _static_ page would be better.
|
| Good example of computing and a Web site: Hacker News!!!!!
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