Guest ajg23 Posted January 19, 2011 Report Posted January 19, 2011 (edited) Although Gingerbread's new cursor positioner is brilliant (better than iOS's magnifying glass!), initating the text selection is ridiculously cumbersome, as further described below...This is one of a number of EASY-TO-FIX obstacles to me being able to recommend Android devices to non-geeks. Another example is that the Android email program does not allow the user to enter an IMAP root folder path, so no one in my entire hospital/university system (thousands of students, residents, nurses, docs, etc, etc!) can access email via it. Yes, I can tell them to get the K-9 app and help them set it up, but that's another hurdle that will make people think "I'll just get an iPhone"! They should be able just to use the default email program and enter the mail server info and get their mail. See links where you can vote to support these fixes below! More on the text selection problem: in Android 2.3 Platform Highlights | Android Developers , it clearly states the user can >...quickly select a word by press-hold, then >copy to the clipboard and paste. ...and... >Pressing on a word enters a free-selection mode > — the user can >adjust the selection area as needed > by dragging a set of bounding arrows... However, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, press-hold only brings up the context, menu, from which the user has to then select "Select Word" before being able to see/move the bounding arrows. Even if it worked as described, IT WOULD BE BETTER to initiate text selection with double-tap (at least as an alternative). Note the precedents: Windows: double tap selects word MacOS: double tap selects word Linux: double tap selects word Early Android: double tap selects word iOS: double tap selects word PalmOS: double tap selects word WindowsCE: double tap selects word PocketPC: double tap selects word Windows Mobile: double tap selects word Windows Phone 7: double tap selects word [?] So people should be able to double-click like they do in every other GUI and then be delighted by the appearance of the bounding arrows! The context menu could pop up in ADDITION to the bounding arrows--then the user can select something from the pop-up or adjust the selection first. These kinds of things are why I'm moving more towards telling colleagues to get iPhones these days ;) ... It kills me how successful Verizon's iPhone is going to be, even though the network it will use is slower than AT&T's...! If you want to support Android being more approachable to non-geeks, please vote for: --fixing text selection at Issue 14145 --fixing the IMAP problem at Issue 1811 Thanks Device: HTC Evo running CM 7 beta Edited January 19, 2011 by ajg23
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