[RaiseProfits]

To be fair, working with text is really hard on mobile and has regressed a long way from general purpose computers like the pc. To undo you have to shake the fucking thing, and text selection takes time and patience (if you can select the text at all!)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Shake to undo and also shake to report a problem and also shake to report abuse.

It does different things in different contexts. I can see how this could be confusing.

vs.

Right click > copy; right click > paste

ctrl / cmd -c; ctrl / cmd -v

Which, in my experience, are (almost?) universal.

If your a keyboard native like me, you probably find text entry and editing on mobile fucking sucks.

[netsharc]

Apple mice only had 1 button because they said they didn't want to confuse people. And nowadays? Multi fingered gestures, long presses, etc. What a shit show!

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Hahahaha! Great comment.

To be fair though, expecting anyone to be consistent from one moment to the next is a pretty tall order ;)

[lonelappde]

You can use a laptop or desktop if you want. Obviously there are tradeoffs when you squeeze 3 sq ft of real estate down to 0.1 sq ft.

[Swenrekcah]

I don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated at my iphone for not having any way to undo. Who thougt this was a good idea? There was a thread the other day about obscure iphone commands, but this takes the shaking cake.

[selimthegrim]

I feel less dumb for not being the only one who didn't know this.

[geoelectric]

In iOS 13 it's worse, because they just changed all of it up. Now shaking and the old gestures for moving the cursor or getting the copy/paste menu don't work either. Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot.

There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue.

iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable."

Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore?

I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up.

We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.

[jedberg]

> Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot.

Wait hold up. I've been on iOS13 for months now and been super frustrated with what I thought was a buggy copy/paste.

Are you telling me I was just doing it wrong?!

[geoelectric]

https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-i...

Afraid so, but there you go. Only reason I found out earlier is I lucked across it in my news feed so don't feel too bad. It's pretty obnoxious they didn't have a transition period where both sets of gestures worked.

[r00fus]

Most of the changes seem intuitive but the cut/copy/paste do not.

I’ll have to give it a shot once I upgrade.

[sp332]

Ok but sharing is easier. Click the share button and it will put the link into email or SMS or... Dropbox, whatever you got lying around on your phone.