/me sitting on my rocker on the porch, waving my cane:
You kids nowdays, you think you have it so tough - back when I was a young whippersnapper, the number spinny (we called em number spinnies, because you spin em) were very reactive; I used to hit them trying to scroll all the time! @Simeon has already fixed em once, making them so you had to tap then slide before you could spin the number. It’s so much better now than it was, you kids have it too easy. NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!
So - seriously - it’s actually a lot better than it was. Having said that, I’ve also seen issues where they “get in the way”. It helps in my particular situation that I tend to use lots of pre-canned data, and the last thing I want or need is to accidentally change them (think mesh vertexes).
So - I’ll suggest what I suggested a long time ago - a preference page… which I guess we have now, for selecting background and colors of the editor, where you could simply turn off spinnies. Leave it on by default. But those of the anti-spin persuasion could nuke em forever, and peace would reign throughout the land.
You know what might be cool? Some way to designate range or type, so you could tap a number and get a knob, good sized, to turn. One issue with the spinnies was that their range was preset - if a number is 0, should it increment by 1s, 100s, or maybe exponentially! But - tap a number and a panel comes up with a few different order-of-magnitude spinnies, a button to restrict to int or not, and a nice big cancel-reset button, and that might be handy. I mean - I use the color picker all the time.
Thank you very much @Simeon! The existing behavior (for numbers, not colors) really drives me crazy; so many times I have accidentally changed a number.
I don’t mind the slidey feature so much, most of the time I don’t find it gets in my way.
My problem is when I tap on a word (be it variable, parameter, anything) and it highlights the whole word but doesn’t bring the keyboard up. Unless the keyboard comes up, I can’t do anything with the highlight so it seems pointless. It catches me out every time and I find it breaks my workflow (which is hard enough learning programming) by having to tap the word, consciously find blank space to get the cursor, then use the keyboard shortcut/tap the word again to place it. It seems like the simple fix would be to bring the keyboard up if you tap and release on a word, and it remain highlighted as it currently does.
If you hold down over it, it makes sense just to use the slidey feature (where applicable) like it already is.
BattleCat’s comment is the one that I get caught by. When the keyboard isn’t shown and I tap in an ordinary place in the code, the keyboard appears. With a number this doesn’t happen.
Numbers just bug me. Often I’m trying to tap next to a number to add a variable, or change another piece of text, and the number sucks my finger in and leaves me searching for the undo key.
The problem is that half the time numbers are used, they are not numbers that can be changed (such as incrementing a variable). When I have numbers that I can change, they usually can only be a specific range of values, such as between 0.9 and 1, or powers of 2. Also, I like the values to be ‘tidy’, such as multiples of 10.
I like @Bortels’ idea, but I think that it doesn’t have to be quite as big. Just a ‘restrict to int’ toggle, a single knob, and a cancel button. Numbers should be restricted to 2 degrees of accuracy, I’ve never needed more than that. So numbers below 10 go up by 0.1, below 100 go up by 1, etc. Or maybe you should keep the same degree of accuracy as the number selected.
Or the toggle could switch between ‘tidy’ (1 degree of accuracy) and ‘accurate’ (2 degrees of accuracy).
It will have to be both easier to use and faster than just editing the number directly to make it worthwhile.
@Simeon I must say my (recent) personal experience is in the mainstream: I love the color and sound picker, but hate the number spinner: always gets in my way. And rewriting the whole number is not really satisfying, many times i just want to change one of the figures only. CODEA is already an AWSOME software and the programmer interface is OUTSTANDING, but you can’t always be perfectly right first time! I would suggest that you just drop this feature (number spinner) , in my opinion that was just a “false good idea”…
By the way, since we talk about editing ergonomy here, I’ll just report the following (small) ennoyment: moving in the text is very long with std gestures. Some appli (EasyDocs, Textastic) have implemented the 4 arrows (up,down, left,right) and it is really a relief! Maybe you could consider implementing (up,down)? Textastic for instance has a pop-up tool for left/right/up/down select-left/right that is not a gadget but a model of ergonomy: makes you forget you are typing from an iPad… Anyway this feedback is just to help improve, Remember it concerns only 0.1% of Codea, the other 99.9% are fabulous! Remain motivated, you are great!
@Andrew_Stacey Wow! thank you, it is not clear from the symbol that one can go up/down… and i had never noticed. It also work with the selector button. Great to know!
I recognise that this is an old discussion, but found it interesting in terms of my new-to-Codea experience over the past few days (yes, that’s all I’ve got, but I’ve already got small projects that I’m happy with, which is a great compliment to the app and to the tutorials and example code floating around).
I find the number slider a good idea but I don’t use it. My finger is too big for me to be able to see what a single digit number reads if my finger is on it. Perhaps when the number slider is in use, a larger font version of the value could appear as an overlay just above the number itself? This could disappear when the slider is released. I have several times had the experience of having the slider functionality kick-in, resolve myself to use it, get the number to close to what I want, peek around my fingertip, and have the number change again.
Another, less newcomer-friendly, way to modify it would be to only enable it for numbers which are enclosed in parentheses - which would also increase the size of the target for the initial tap.
This quibble aside, there is a lot I like about the code editor. Even without being able to say %s/cx/self.cx/g in it…
The biggest problem I continue to have with this is that I often find myself wanting to replace numbers with text, or to mix numbers and text. As a project goes on, I discover I want to swap constants for variables or formulas. But trying to get my cursor into the space and change it can be irritating. This is true in almost every place a number occurs. Yes, the tools for moving the cursor have helped, yes, the way number selection works now is better than at first, but it still gets in the way.
And to pitch in another old whine – how about turning off the pop-up selectors when there is one or more letters in the mix? For example, in editing color, if I’ve gone in and coded my color to be “myred + 10, myGreen - 25…” etc, the last thing I want when I go to edit it is for the color selector to get in my way.
