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179 points joelkesler | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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jhhh ◴[] No.46258932[source]
I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

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ahartmetz ◴[] No.46262023[source]
>Text selection on mobile is trash

Doesn't have to be - Blackberry BB10 had damn near solved it. I think they had some patents on it, but these should have expired, and I noticed some corresponding changes in Android. But it's still far from being as good as BB10. What BB10 had was a kind of combined cursor and magnifying glass that controlled really well, plus the ability to tap the thing left or right to move one letter at a time.

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johanyc ◴[] No.46267436[source]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk

it doesn't look very easy to use in the demo tbh

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1. ahartmetz ◴[] No.46282250[source]
It looks like the thing that I remembered appears at 2:06 and later. I also tried to find a video example when I wrote my post and didn't find anything. Seems like very few people get excited about text selection.