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by callumlocke 2005 days ago
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)

3 comments

Interesting. I'd like that for Notes.app which is my go-to example for how transparent autosave + always-editable can fail catastrophically.

Once I had a very long list in Notes.app that I'd been maintaining over a few years. One day while scrolling it on mobile, I somehow replaced the entire document with some stray input, and by the time I noticed, undo couldn't restore it. Though I was able to recover it because my laptop (which Notes.app will sync to) hadn't yet connected to the internet.

> Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least.

Same in google docs mobile app. Edit button in the bottom right corner.

I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)