The ability to edit a number by dragging is cute, but IMO not all that useful. To edit the number by typing, one has to click elsewhere and use the cursor moving feature to get to the right place. Not difficult, certainly, but if others are like me, the drag to change the value isn’t worth keeping.
That said, Codea is cool, and this is just a nit. Thanks!
Yeah, it kind of screws me up more often than being useful.
Yeah, I actually think Codea would be better without this feature.
+1 I agree.
I gotta say, I’ve never found it useful, and have come unstuck a few times losing values by accident.
Yeah, sorry. Nice thought, but it gets in the way far more often than it proves helpful.
Now that Codea has an options screen, how about letting us turn this off?
You’re talking about the parameter/iparameters? Well you have two options you can code around them or not include them at all.
You don’t have to use them however I do feel it would be a bit short sided to not take into consideration the other options they (the parameters) may give you like with mixing colors for instance which may not have been included?
Color picking is fine, it’s just the number
picker that messes me up.
They did not mean the parameters @MyC0dea, they meant the ability to change a number in the code by dragging your finger over it, e.g. In this code
N = 34
You could drag your finger over the 34, hold it for a second or so, and then drag… It will change the number…
+10
Never useful - it’s hard to select an exact number because it changes when the finger moves out.
Always confusing - when it is being turned on when I just want to select a text.
How does it get in the way? Perhaps we can just stop it from getting in the way.
Originally they changed as soon as you started dragging. They were modified so that you needed to long-press then drag to activate them. Are you still accidentally activating them? Do they need a longer press before activation begins?
I just really think everyone thinks it is an overall useless feature. I enjoy that it will highlight the numbers, but I don’t want my finger sliding over the number to change the value at all.
@Deamos I’d like to hear how it hinders, though. That is something that concerns me (if you can safely ignore the feature, then it’s fine).
Edit: @RonJeffries you can tap the number to select it entirely, then type a new number over the top. I found this more useful than iOS’ standard cursor placement tools (either the start or end of the number, depending on location of the tap, treats floats as two numbers).
Do you prefer to put the cursor at the end of the number and then backspace it before typing a new value?
Number: NO X(
Color: yes :))
EDIT:
The slide-to-change function is allright, but there’s some problems:
Possible solutions:
(completely random stuff incoming)
If currentTouch.x > numberThatWillChange.x + 3 then
NumberThatWillChange = numberThat… + numberThat…
End
Same thing to make the number go down, this way, you would first slide to change the number you want, and then move your finger back to the center(if for example i first slided to increase the number, the moment i to back to the center it wouldnt make it decrease) this way when you leave the screen, no matter if you make a slight move or not, it wouldnt change the number…
and maybe include the function in a settings menu with turn on/off…
In the grand scheme I just find this to be a useless feature. Selecting and retyping a number is not difficult or cumbersome, so I don’t think that we really need Codea to try to help there. For whatever reason, I have accidentally activated the number picker several times, and usually just end up having to select and retype the number anyway.
Instead of doing more work to make a not useful feature less cumbersome, I would advocate removing it completely and instead spend the time working on other things that would be useful, like a larger undo buffer, or handling multi-line syntax highlighting better, or highlighting for multi-line comments, or the function picker that@JockM recently proposed, or smarter parenthesis autocompletion, or iparameter callbacks, or…ok I think I’ve made my point, there are lots of other things that could be improved that would have a far more positive impact than tweaking the number picker.
@Simeon, where it hinders is that selection and editing of numbers simply doesn’t work like other text. You have to change gears when moving between numbers and other items. It’s especially off putting when editing formulas. Tap-tap selects a word in the formula, tap selects a number. The inconsistency just leaves me wrong footed (wrong fingered?). There are a lot of places where it pays to change the standard text-edit behavior on the iPad, even if that behavior is familiar. This isn’t one of them.
And even with the latest, much safer, version I find myself still accidentally changing a number several times a day. Undo doesn’t seem to fix it, making it irritating if I don’t remember the original number.
I think this feature is not usefull at all, but it’s only my personal opinion.
Thanks @Mark. Just making sure that accidental activation is still the issue, and it seems to be.
We can fix the selection part by making tapping a number not select it (and instead position the cursor as iOS would position it).
When I change numbers, it’s often not by one, but by changing the tens or hundred digit, so I don’t use the scroll method. I find it faster to retype the number. I like to do this by positioning the cursor and back spacing or using the new select button to change a few digits of the number. One other drawback of this feature is that it takes additional time for the editor to display and scroll sections of code with lots of numbers.