killmoms

iPhone copypasta

With all the attention being given iPhone text selection/copy & paste lately (and this being an issue I’ve thought about a fair amount), I decided to throw in my two cents.

Firstly, I’ve always considered text selection (and the subsequent copy/paste operations) to be the sorts of operations that would require two hands. For one, pretty much all the obvious single-finger gestures have been taken. For two, these operations are what I like to call “primary activities.” I can understand wanting gestures to only require one hand in most cases, but when you’re selecting, cutting/copying, pasting or deleting blocks of text, you’re probably giving the phone your full attention.

I envision it going something like this:

1. You position the opening cursor by tap/holding and dragging to get the loupe, as you do now.
2. Instead of letting go, you continue to hold with that finger, and begin to make the same gesture with another finger to summon another loupe/cursor. This defines the end of the selection. At this point you’re selecting text. I picture this being done with both thumbs.
3. Once you have made the selection (by letting go with one or both thumbs, probably both), a contextual menu appears, perhaps attached to the second (end) loupe and represented by simple icons, with the cut/copy/paste (and potentially delete) operations. This could also be done like the “multiple operations buttons” that appear when you want to do something with a photo in a Photo Album on the phone (Use as Wallpaper, E-mail, etc.)—probably the better of the two choices in that it’s larger, draws more attention to itself, and uses words to represent possible actions instead of tiny pictograms.

There are some obvious problems with this idea though. Firstly, it’s really centered around the applications where you’re actively editing text: Notes, Mail, SMS, etc. It doesn’t work as well for “viewer” applications like Safari where you might want to copy text from a page you’re looking at. In those cases I’d almost expect you’d have to perform some odd finger operation like a double-tap-and-hold/drag to initiate “text selection mode” that gives you a cursor within the text contained on the page.

Secondly, and perhaps more of a showstopper, there’s no good way that I can see to give the user an option to paste once he’s copied something to the clipboard. Perhaps summoning the cursor-dragging loupe once something has been copied would add a “paste” icon to the loupe, which could be clicked with a second finger? It’s at this point that you either start putting UI widgets in ugly—or non-intuitive—places.

I think the real issue is that Apple seems very reluctant to give in to traditional desktop computer navigation methods—and with good reason, considering the radically different input method their device employs. While multi-touch makes navigating documents much more physically tactile and intuitive, it makes more involved editing tasks much more complicated to portray. When navigating a view is as simple as swiping a finger, suddenly all that “the cursor is your metaphorical hand” stuff seems completely out of place. It’s just a shame that so many of our current mental models for editing text rely on an intermediary device between our hands and our words.

Filed by matt at July 31st, 2008 under Technology