Friday, February 14, 2014

SwipeSelection Pro

Jeff Benjamin:

Everyone can benefit from SwipeSelection’s extremely improved cursor management when compared to stock iOS. I apologize in advance to Kyle Howells, developer of SwipeSelection, but this is one of those tweaks that I wish Apple would straight-up steal; it’s just that good.

[…]

The stock method of positioning the cursor while typing in iOS is cumbersome at best, and incredibly frustrating at times. It’s hard to gain the necessary precision using the stock method of editing text, and that’s where SwipeSelection comes in to save the day.

SwipeSelection lets you swipe directly on the iOS keyboard in order to move the cursor. This allows you to place the edit cursor in specific spots with much more precision than before. You can even select text by swiping from the shift key or from the delete key.

I haven’t jailbroken my iPhone, but this is tempting. For all the talk about how a hardware keyboard isn’t necessary and how Apple took the time to get text selection and copy/paste right, the on-screen keyboard remains the most frustrating part of iOS for me.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

What's much worse (yet I’ve never seen complained about) is selection in Web views on iOS. In some cases it seems to be 100% *impossible* to select what you want, parrticularly when it's a table cell. Zooming in sometimes helps.

I did finally discover a few days ago that you can two-finger-tap to select a paragraph (like triple-clicking on Mac), which is hugely helpful. It doesn’t work in Web views, but it does in text views and Pages.

@Nicholas Yes, I’ve seen that problem with Web views as well.

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