Concept Video Suggests Means to Vastly Improve Text Editing in iOS

[Dagless]

I'd kill for this feature.

Well not kill a human. I'd kill an animal. Like a cow, but I'd get someone else to do it and I'd eat the cow after.

I'd eat a cow for this feature.

[MattInOz]

Originally Posted by Dagless

I'd kill for this feature.

Well not kill a human. I'd kill an animal. Like a cow, but I'd get someone else to do it and I'd eat the cow after.

I'd eat a cow for this feature.

Seeing there seems to be a lot of Vegetarians at Apple I think they'd be more swayed by promising to eat one less cow this year.

[robotphood]

I've been using swipeselection on my iPhone and iPad and although it works great on my iPad, I've come some nags on the iPhone. When I move the cursor through a body of text and start at the letter K (for example), it will work however the letter is "pressed" and the next tap enters a K. If I'm editing throughout a body of text I end up adding various letters all over. Sort of defeats the purpose. Selecting text doesn't have this problem though. Also this doesn't happen on the iPad.

[Lahmy88]

Kudos to whoever coded that - Great work!

[Dagless]

Originally Posted by robotphood

I've been using swipeselection on my iPhone and iPad and although it works great on my iPad, I've come some nags on the iPhone. When I move the cursor through a body of text and start at the letter K (for example), it will work however the letter is "pressed" and the next tap enters a K. If I'm editing throughout a body of text I end up adding various letters all over. Sort of defeats the purpose. Selecting text doesn't have this problem though. Also this doesn't happen on the iPad.

Something that hackers quickly hobbled together doesn't work perfectly? Surely that can't be true?

[elppa]

This is actually one of those brilliant ideas that seems completely obvious… but only once you've seen it. That is a hallmark of good design right there.

The only change I would consider is to reserve the two finger gesture for end of line/start of line.

Aside: Selecting text on Windows Phone is a sack of potatoes, especially multi line text in portrait view. So these problems aren't exclusive to iOS. "Highlight three paragraphs of text" won't appear in the smoked by Windows Phone challenge any time soon.

Originally Posted by Macopotamus

Interesting concept, but this is more complicated than the current method which means Apple won't implement it.

It can complement the current method. It is less discoverable, but the same can be said about many of the current gestures. I would say the current method is more fiddly and slower than this.

Originally Posted by 2 Replies

I have a degree in Computer Science and have studied usability and interface design for over a decade.
I'm going to tell you right now that more options is NEVER bad.

Bertrand Serlet disagrees with you. He has a degree in Computer Science and worked on NeXTSTEP/Mac OS X for over a decade.

One of the forum members wrote to him and he replied:

On Jan 28, 2009, at 1:43 AM, Bertrand Serlet wrote:

We try to stay away from options because if you make a system with one path rather than two paths you put all your energy in designing the best path rather than divide your energy in two (or worse divide it unevenly and have one mediocre alternative).
Also for the user its simpler without a choice.

For any one preference this is not a big deal, but when multiplied by a thousand, you create a mess.

-- Bertrand

Link

[mtaylorPSU]

This is a great feature and I'm sure Apple will never do it. Why? They've seen it before! They even bought the company that showed it to them. I'm sure they would have tried to implement it if they thought it made sense.

This is not particularly impressive because it's already been done by fingerworks with their touchstream products until 2003, when apple purchased the company. Anyone who has used their multitouch keyboard will know that highlighting text and moving the cursor works in a very similar manner, the only difference being the number of fingers used. The reason this appears to be new is twofold:

1. The keyboard is on the screen of a smaller device.
2. In comparison to the number of people who own an iPad, very, very few people ever owned or used a touchstream.

Just my two cents.

[theBB]

Originally Posted by Boghog

But it isn't a swiping up gesture, is it? It's a hold-for-one-second-then-swipe-up-and-slightly-to-the-right gesture (which btw was way better before iOS4 when it automatically preselected the most likely character (e.g. in German äöüß) from the list). This in itself is pretty much broken for languages like German where these characters are really common (and other languages I suspect). At least on the iPad there should be enough space for a standard German (or French or Turkish etc.) keyboard.

Even on iPhone, Apple should drop the letters that don't exist in that foreign language and replace them with some of the letters that now requires this slow method. Its soft keyboard is far better than a hardware keyboard would be for this purpose, but it is still disappointing to see Apple stop just before that last step.

[BornAgainMac]

Originally Posted by TvdW

This would break the keyboard for many non-English languages.

Really hoping Apple won't implement this. Sorry.

All non-English languages? I can understand some of the more advanced languages like Chinese and Hebrew would be difficult to adapt but not something like Spanish and French.

[cheesygrin]

Originally Posted by TvdW

This would break the keyboard for many non-English languages.

Really hoping Apple won't implement this. Sorry.

Not necessarily - selecting alternate characters requires a swipe UP - selecting text generally starts with a swipe SIDEWAYS. Selecting text upwards could work by disabling alternate characters as soon as a sideways swipe is detected.

[appleaddictx]

As cool as this keyboard feature is, Apple is a company of integration, and releasing this means it would almost have to be available on iPhone and iPod Touch, which is difficult to integrate onto such a small screen. If this were abailable, I would hope there was an option to turn it off incase it gets annoying. I still think this would be nice for my crazy notetaking habits though.

[Ashyukun]

I installed this on my jailbroken 4S shortly after it came out, and have been using it with it installed until a short while ago when I uninstalled it.

I don't know whether it was just because of the smaller keyboard (I have a New iPad, so it's not able to be jailbroken yet to test it there...), or something with how I use the keyboard when typing, but it actually made typing a lot more annoying since it would constantly detect that I was trying to swipe or move the cursor when I was just trying to type normally. I'd be typing along and suddenly would be back in the middle of a previous word without trying to do so.

When it came to actually TRYING to move around, it was a lot nicer at that- but it was hard to initiate just moving around without also hitting another key and dropping a character I didn't want in.

I think that having a key that you hold down to begin the swiping gesture so it doesn't start when unwanted may be necessary, at least on the iPhone. That or a setting change for the sensitivity so you have to hold your fingers on the keyboard for longer before it thinks you're trying to swipe to navigate.

If/when the jailbreak for the New iPad comes out, I've give it a try there as well and see if it works better on the larger keyboard. I'm especially curious how it will work with the 'split mode' thumb-keyboard that I use about half the time...

[WordMasterRice]

Originally Posted by appleaddictx

As cool as this keyboard feature is, Apple is a company of integration, and releasing this means it would almost have to be available on iPhone and iPod Touch, which is difficult to integrate onto such a small screen. If this were abailable, I would hope there was an option to turn it off incase it gets annoying. I still think this would be nice for my crazy notetaking habits though.

Kind of like the multitasking gestures that the iPad has that are not on the iPhone? Did I miss something?