New Text Selection UI

While Codea 1.4 is waiting for an updated Dropbox SDK (should be available Monday), I decided to mess around with the keyboard features, inspired by Daniel Hooper’s wonderful iPad keyboard prototype (his prototype is here: http://youtu.be/RGQTaHGQ04Q?hd=1).

This is the result. It feels fairly nice to use and the old caret shifting behaviour is still there, too (tap on the left or right side of the buttons). What do you think?

(Apologies to @Mark for butchering his Battle Chips code during the video.)

Like! Very nice. Looking forward to it!

Awesome, go for it!

That would be fantastic! I have a pretty hard time with the stupid magnifying glass apple thing!

It looks quite nice!

um - YES.

(I’m actually spoiled by the Codea keyboard already - the “real” apple keyboard needs cursor control, badly. Tap-to-move-the-cursor is poor, at best)

Wow, that’s even a bit better than Hooper’s idea. One objection that was brought up (elsewhere) is that it is not intuitive, whereas it was also mentioned that this property would be in good company with some of Apple’s own creations. The solution with the dedicated keys is more obvious.

I always thought about using a real keyboard for my iPad, with cursor movement and selection being one prominent feature, but such nice solutions will make it even less likely that I’m going to actually buy on.

And, luckily, Hooper made his idea available publicly. I don’t know if this idea is patentable (I think so, every silly shhhhh is patentable, starting with Microsoft’s IsNot operator) but I suspect that the future of virtual keyboards would have been much worse if a big company came up with it.

@Simeon, I played with this in the beta today. I think it works really well and it’s great having more control over the cursor.

I did have some trouble using it to select a few pages worth of code. I used the new select button to select the first page. Then touched the screen to “page down” and see if I needed to keep selecting more code. Then when I touched the select button again, it moved the screen position back to the start of the selection. Would it be possible to prevent the screen from moving when I press the button?

One other thing - if the end of the selection is on one the last few lines just above the keyboard, then the “cut | copy | paste | lookup” box that pops up will cover the select button so it makes it hard to press it again to continue extending your selection.

Verdict: it is all goodness and light. It exactly fills a gap that has been very frustrating for me.

YES! I love it! I’m looking forward to this. This will really help :slight_smile:

Yup, looks great :slight_smile: I also like Daniels Keyboard, but at least for us in germany that would be problematic because on the ipad keyboard we tap a vowel and drag upwards to get an umlaut. So your solution looks a lot more useful :slight_smile: Hooray for not having to move the cursor by tapping any more (which never worked for me when the new position was just one line above and somewhat close to the old position…)