<story><title>Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem</title><url>https://jenson.org/text/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>This is absolutely a problem, but I&amp;#x27;m not convinced the author has found a solution. I&amp;#x27;d have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Could any amount of well-designed software make text entry efficient on this machine?&lt;p&gt;This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BugWatch</author><text>Why not something akin to &amp;quot;fixed-offset cursor&amp;quot;? Actual cursor&amp;#x2F;pointer is always a centimeter above the finger position (thus always visible [bottom of the screen to be handled as a special case]), and finger movements manipulate position, while hold duration accesses alternate modes.&lt;p&gt;For a somewhat similar implementation (touchscreen is essentially handled as touchpad) look at how Teamviewer handles remote sessions to Windows desktop from smartphones.&lt;p&gt;I would really like any&amp;#x2F;all of those as a toggle-on mode for use on Android itself... selecting text with arthritis fingers is a pain – literally and figuratively.</text></comment>
<story><title>Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem</title><url>https://jenson.org/text/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>This is absolutely a problem, but I&amp;#x27;m not convinced the author has found a solution. I&amp;#x27;d have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Could any amount of well-designed software make text entry efficient on this machine?&lt;p&gt;This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hutzlibu</author><text>&amp;quot;A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Not quite. A touchscreen can detect many fingers, that can do many gestures.&lt;p&gt;The problem is, exept zooming (pinching with 2 fingers) and moving around (swiping with 2 fingers) the potential is pretty much unused.</text></comment>