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by ndorf 1002 days ago
Speaking of selecting text, at least on Android there is a trend in both Google and third-party messaging apps of only letting you copy the entire message, not a substring thereof.

I wish I could take a peek into the brain of whoever came up with that idea -- ideally, after removing it with a large, sharp rock.
3 comments
TRiG_Ireland 1002 days ago
More than once I've copied an entire message, pasted it into Google Keep, selected the bit that I want and pasted that elsewhere, and then deleted the note in Keep. Frustrating.
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hilbert42 1000 days ago
"...there is a trend in both Google and third-party messaging apps of only letting you copy the entire message, not a substring thereof."

Yeah, right. But it's not just confined to Android apps, for years selecting text with the mouse and copying from within Windows Firefox has been flaky, it can work but often it doesn't. If I want such copy to work for certain then I highlight the text and use Ctrl-c/v to finish the job.

Similarly, selecting some text such as part of a URL is nigh on impossible in Firefox (the URL becomes a single entity). Also, when selecting such text it's better approached starting after the text rather than before and working backwards—and even then it's best to start from a few words further on and discard the extra after the paste. Sometimes, with 'awkward' pages it's best to do a 'Select all' on Android or Ctrl-a elsewhere then paste into a text editor and fine tune one's selection from there.

It's ridiculous. I cannot understand why this hasn't been fixed, surely I'm not the only one who experiences these problems.

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roge7331 1001 days ago
Most of the time the user just wants to share the entire speech bubble and it is way easier this way instead of fiddling with beginning and endpoints
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ndorf 1000 days ago
I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to share an entire speech bubble, without any context (as in a screenshot).

On the other hand, it's obvious that given a message like "My address is 123 Xyzzy Rd, come anytime," the user would only want to select a subset, not the entire message.

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hilbert42 1000 days ago
"...without any context (as in a screenshot)."

Right, it saves typing when using some of the words elsewhere, and or when there's something in the bubble like a URL or awkward Unicode character. Copying the text is much quicker than regenerating it from scratch—or it ought to be!

Also, with an address and or phone number it saves making copying errors (I regularly copy text this way).

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hilbert42 1000 days ago
Why? All those algorithms/selection code are commonplace and were solved decades ago so why aren't they used?
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