The Invisible Problem

I'm so glad someone's working on this! Text editing on mobile has never been an invisible problem to me. I usually think Apple really nails good UI and UX, but text editing on an iPhone has never been good. (As the article mentions, it's "good enough" for short quick things like texts or whatever, but not so good for anything longer.)

The solution presented here is half-great, IMO. I really love the persistant cursor and dragging anywhere jumps the cursor to there. And the magnifier is great here too.

But I'm not crazy about "pressing harder" to do anything. Apple's 3D Touch never worked too well for me, despite the fact that I usually like Apple's UI and UX, and I'd be willing to bet Apple's implementation was the best implementation of that so far. Maybe this is something that I'd get used to if using?

I'm also not crazy about the proposed menu. It seems like it would be kind of confusing to me, like the way inverted-mouse (or joystick) feels right in some games and wrong in others. Or similarly, how inverted scrollwheel scrolling might feel right to someone used to touchpad scrolling but wrong to someone not used to touchpads. Again, though, maybe after trying it out it would actually work OK. It's kind of hard to say, but I'm skeptical.

Regardless, I'm really glad there's at least someone trying to rethink and improve text editing on mobile. I wonder if anyone can come up with enough of an improvement that Google or Apple would change how it is on their phones? Or is it too late, and they're going to stick with what we have forever because too many people are already used to it?