scottjenson

I'm the author of the paper. The prototype was never released by Google unfortunately. The implentation we used was a bit hacky, using a visual effects layer over the text editing layer. It was tricky to keep them in sync. A more robust implementation would try to avoid that. I'm happy to discuss specifics in you're interested.

I post nearly everyone on my blog jenson.org

I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day.

I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!

This needs more discussion. Too many don't understand Apple's privacy stance, which has some reasonable elements, is being used to massively foot drag on everyone else trying to build an open web ecosystem.

Passive agressive? (I'm the author) I did research to find a better solution. I did and discovered a wide range of market forces (e.g. people don't like to change) that will make it difficult to ship.

But the last thing I intended was to imply giving up. I said very clearly in the post that my solution, Eloquent, was meant to be one possible solution. There are likely many others! My goal of this post was to clearly describe the problem so people a) understood b) knew there were alternatives and c) we could get fired up to actually solve this (even though it WILL be hard to change)

That's a fair point, thank you for bringing that up (I'm the author) While these are certainly helpful, the fact that almost no one knows about this proves they aren't really working all that well. Discovery is a key issue that can't be ignored.

This is exactly the point I tried to make in the paper. Teens are using the phone and that's fine, but if you watch them, it's horribly inefficient. I'm not saying stop using the phone, I'm saying your kid can be far more productive.

I'm the author of the paper. That first one though you called out is VERY interesting (the others seem quite close to what is already done today)

We tried pause-to-select and it user tested very poorly as users were thrown into selection far too easily. It was very irritating. However, I can't really criticize it until I've tried it. I'll upgrade my iPad and check it out. Thanks.

oooh, interesting! I'll check it out, thanks!

This is a lovely thing to read on a Sunday morning, thank you!

I'm the author. I agree, this could be a good way to do it. It's what I meant by a "slow burn" in the post. For example, just start with improvements to tapping and dragging, then add a better magnifier, etc. Just getting rid of some of these ambiguous bugs would be helpful.

I'm the author. I've been trying...

I'm the author. As the code is owned by Google, I'm a bit constrained in sharing it. I've got permission to talk about the work and show it, but that's about it.

Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the whole point was to see how easy it was to target.

As to your "it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a problem. However, if you believe that mobile will replace desktop, then you've got a problem as sophisticated text composition is quite hard on mobile.

I am aware ;-) It's certainly helpful. My point is that it's not nearly enough. The goal of this post was to make it clear that the entire model of mobile editing is flawed and it's helpful to rethink it. However, I'm all for anything that can help!

That seems like a simple idea to test in a keyboard (well the loupe might be hard) but moving the cursor and using SHIFT to select are fairly easy. Who's working on an Android keyboard here? ;-)

You actually can paste between words but it's hidden (like most things with mobile text editing) You need to place the text cursor between the words carefully, tap the 'teardrop' on the text handle, and that will bring up the menu to paste. (not saying that's good!)

I got that a lot as well, people claiming that kids were writing entire papers on their phone, therefore it must be fine. Just because some people can run a marathon, doesn't mean everyone does.

Describes the problems with mobile text editing, why it needs to be fixed, and a prototype of an potential solution.

I think I'm paying a price for having a linkbait title. I don't honestly think this is a web vs native issue at all. I think that native has had too much power and that apps 'must die' as they suck up all the oxygen. It blinds people from seeing alternatives. That's my point, we have to be able to explore alternatives and the current native app silo approach will make JIT interaction impossible.

As to the people on this thread that think JIT interaction is a privacy nightmare, i never said these things would install automatically, this has to offer itself when the user requests it, i.e. I want to look at THIS bustop now. All I'm talking about is reducing the pain threshold to getting to functionality. That's all. It's not as sinister as you make it sound.