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Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
by bobbylarrybobby 7mo ago
Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
- thehappyfellow 7mo agoWhich means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!
- leptons 7mo agoIt honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been. It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.
- tambourine_man 7mo agoI actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying
- leptons 7mo agoWell good for you, I guess?
- b112 7mo agoAs bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps: <BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!! <CosmicRay/#debian> haha <BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQzk/m/N7y3Z4yAi_cJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...
- Daneel_ 7mo agoThere are dozens of us!
- abanana 7mo agoNot always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.
- leptons 7mo agolol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s. Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus. Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too. The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever. Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is. They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.
- muppetman 7mo agoAs someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.
- hollandheese 7mo agoBecause Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder. And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.
- ethbr1 7mo ago
- nashashmi 7mo agothey are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).
- viraptor 7mo agoLooking at every UI/UX implementation around be and on my devices... I'm not sure anyone does anymore. Not in a haha way, I actually see so many trivial issues all around, I don't understand how they passed any contact with testing and user feedback.
- smugtrain 7mo agoThis was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles and the like. Most unfair and this iPhone 3G to iPhone 17 Pro user is seriously considering ditching them over select all
- PcChip 7mo ago>This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles do you have a source for that?
- RupertSalt 7mo agoI have some kind of mental block that prevents me from figuring out the state of touchscreen controls. "Is that a Play button because it's currently playing, or because it is paused/stopped, and will play when I tap it?" "Is Bluetooth on or off? That depends if Dark Mode on?" I end up tapping the control 3 times or so. The latter dilemma could sometimes be worked out by surveying the state of every surrounding control, but tunnel vision and impatience keep winning.
- lobf 7mo ago> They are mediocre at best, always have been. Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design. My 85 year old grandpa asked me about 20 years ago how he should go about learning how to use computers. We were a windows family at home but I was using Macs in school and OSX was relatively new and I thought it blew Windows out of the water as far as usability. Didn’t take long for my grandpa to be sending me emails and news links, and becoming an overall competent and comfortable computer user, in his late 80s, and I credit that to Apple’s fantastic design. I think maybe we forget how using Windows 98 and XP was day-to-day.
- nativeit 7mo agoThis is accurate. Apple’s been losing its soul ever since they spent a billion dollars making a headquarters that’s shaped like the “Home” button that they then immediately got rid of.
- lucketone 7mo agoSo what I’m reading, is they are able to dumb-down the design to fit less tech savvy people. When tailoring for one audience you usually do tale away something from other audiences.
- insensible 7mo agoI understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.
- leptons 7mo ago>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design. OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base. The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side. Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using. There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX. I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.
- hbs18 7mo agoThe physical keyboard on your computer is also always in capital letters. Is that bad design too?
- Matl 7mo agoThe advantage of software is the 'soft' part i.e. it's much easier to change than hardware. Unless physical keyboards had mini displays for every key, they're a good design given the 'physical' limitation of their design. A touchscreen displays 'soft'ware that's easy to change and make smarter than physical items.
- brookst 7mo agoApple has fantastic UX people. Also really bad ones. It’s a mistake to think a company that size is homogenuous. In general, IMO they are better than most companies but far from perfect. Maybe 80th percentile. I’m hard pressed to think of a top 10 tech company that’s better. Lots of smaller companies are.
- odysseus 7mo agoI have a JavaScript share sheet shortcut that forces a select all on any page. Really useful. Something like this: var result = []; body = document.body; sel = window.getSelection(); range = document.createRange(); range.selectNodeContents(body); sel.removeAllRanges(); sel.addRange(range); selString = sel.toString(); // Call completion to finish completion(selString);
- hbn 7mo agoIn editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help. What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.
- OkGoDoIt 7mo agoIt’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)
- hbn 7mo agoI know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links) But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.
- disillusioned 7mo agoIt works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful
- wonnage 7mo agoWord segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.
- spockz 7mo agoJust keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.