I've been in contact with Daniel Hooper, who originally came up with the idea and made the video posted other day, and he says he's happy to see people adopt it in their apps. I think Daniel deserves a great deal of credit for putting this idea out there in the open instead of patenting it like some large companies might be tempted to do.
I've been implementing this functionality in my own word processor, UX Write, and will have it included in the first version when its released in the next few weeks. I've posted some details on my own implementation at http://www.uxproductivity.com/blog/2012/05/05/text-selection...
I noticed that in this video they have a separate button above the keyboard for triggering selection, instead of using the shift key like in Daniel's demo. I ran into some conflicts with the shift key between my own gesture recognition and the built-in keyboard logic, as I suspect the developer of SlideWriter did too. The separate button looks like a good solution.
Agreed. I'm somewhat annoyed that TNW's writeup doesn't even mention Daniel Hooper's video, which sparked all this sudden interest in iOS text editing a few days ago:
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/05/07/slidewriter-might-be-t...
How difficult would it be to have the sliding gestures on the keyboard itself? Keeping my fingers at the same place would make things even faster...
Also, have you tried experimenting with acceleration curves for moving the cursor - i.e. moving the finger slow would yield a 1:1 cursor movement, while moving the finger faster would move the cursor something more like 8 times faster than the finger. With the right acceleration curve, the two-finger gesture could be dropped, and you could be even faster.
I'd love to use this in the editor of my choice. Could you make this open source?
I like the idea of the acceleration controlling cursor speed, I'll try it out and see how it feels.
After I get it to a place that feels good, I'll either release it as a component that can be dropped in, or open source it.
However the icon for the slide button could be better and simpler to understand. Maybe by showing a standard slider.
after a selection is made, it might be nice to pop-up cut/copy/paste options automatically (unless it does that and i missed it).
when will it be available to the general public?
good suggestion for the pop-up after a selection, I will add that in.
going to submit it to the App Store this week, I will follow up when it is available
Awesome job, I'll install it as soon as it hits the App Store
Works on iPhone as well, and is available now.
Great work by the way!
Sent from my iPad
It uses two fingers to select text because I couldn't figure out how to detect when the shift key was pressed.
