Apps like Instagram/Pintrest have just made the user feel blunt when they can't even select a snippet of text in the app, following hyperlinks in a comment...or even download media by right-clicking on the web-browser
To be fair this is not a new problem. Windows still doesn't let you select text at all in certain GUI contexts. Especially annoying when you need to copy an error message.
most error messages you can just click on the error window and press ctrl+c and then paste to your favorite text editor.
this works nearly everywhere in W10- that uses native code to display the error, I can't vouch for how well this works in W11 where they butchered everything
Sure for native GUIs yes, but this was already something browsers supported & these apps just steam-rolled their 'keep 'em hooked & on platform' plan....I just lose patience when there's no slider on most doom-scroll apps either. Like c'mon....thankfully reddit still has it
Staying consistent with their brilliant UX and smart design choices, I like Telegram's approach/solution to chat bubble selection. The first long-press selects the entire bubble, bringing up message-specific options, and second long-press on the substring initiates finer text selection.
This is a problem to a degree even in Messages.app.
If a message consists of only a phone number for example, it's very hard to hit the pixel you need to long-press to copy it, otherwise all you get is phone number context like whether you want to call the number, create a contact, or add to a contact.
If you manage to hit the frame of the bubble you can get the context menu for copying all of it, but that's often quite hard in my experience.
Not really, or it has some pretty weird ideas about preferred units in my region. When trying to get a conversion for 1 cup, it tells me it's 0.5 pints. My region is Finland, language is Finnish, and roughly no-one understands those units.
The metric conversions are idiotic. Converting "1 cup" to 5 decimal places is misleading, and offering alternatives in l / cl / ml (with a capital ell??) is useless. The addition of cm^3 is the cherry on top :)
This was clearly designed by someone who has never used the metric system.
A human would convert it to "1/4 liter" or "250ml".
Edit: Actually, a human would convert "1 cup of flour" into "150g flour", since most local recipes use weight instead of volume for solids. Which shows that good localisation is a lot more than just literal translation + unit conversion.
Yeah I totally understand that we don't need to clutter the interface with features.
But for example, when you want to go to certain position in a text paragraph, it is super intuitive in Android to click on the text wherever you want the cursor to be. If you try that in iOS, it does that, but the precision is really really bad, like unusable. To precisely place a cursor in iOS you need to hold the spacebar. I know that, but I doubt the average user does, how would they? Even after knowing that, the Android way is much less of a headache.
> in Android to click on the text wherever you want the cursor to be. If you try that in iOS, it does that, but the precision is really really bad, like unusable.
Try holding and moving that text pointer instead of clicking, that makes it super precise. Clicking is for rough, holding and moving is for very precise.
I agree that discovering the spacebar gesture on your own is fairly difficult, but the holding and moving feels easily naturally discoverable. You are literally picking up the pointer and moving it to where you want it, with continuous visual feedback throughout the process, instead of clicking and hoping it will land at the correct location.
That’s all well and good. Dragging the cursor works. But the question remains, when you click in the text area, why doesn’t the cursor go where you clicked? I end up dragging it a lot more than should be necessary. Maybe they figured people make typos at the end of a word more often.
I can't imagine it's changed since I used it a few years ago. But it used to be that single tap only took you to a word boundary on iOS. So for example if you were to tap in between 3 and 4 in the text "1234567890", the nearest word boundary would be between " and 1. So you couldn't tap within a word but if you wanted to ditch a word it'd be easy to tap the right side of it to get to its right boundary.
It also works for photos/images! If you have text in your photo that contains a unit, you can click on the Live Text button in one of the corners and then on the unit itself, and you will get a conversion automatically. It works not only for units, but for currency too.
That must have come with iOS 16, when they also decided to swap the "Look up" option with "Translate" for some unknown reason.
So dozen of times per day I am translating snippets of text per day every bloody time I want to search a term on Wikipedia or Google, and my muscle memory taps on the wrong button. Thanks, Apple.
I have found the text recognition to be surprisingly mediocre. Even when the text is from a screenshot taken on the device, it often makes mistakes. Worst of all, it is overconfident and the text capture icon pops up all the time, leading me to think it will save time to copy/paste instead of trying to remember a string. I wish it knew its limitations a bit better.
