In the last year, the iOS app developer world has decided all at once to take away our ability to select bits of text in messaging apps, like Apple Messages, Facebook Messenger and Slack.
Apparently, they did this in order to optimize for putting little 👍 or 🤣 or 🥰 emojis on messages.
So, say we want to look up a word in a dictionary, or say we want select and copy just one part of a long message in order to quote it, or say we want to select a phone number out of an invite message — to name some real-life annoyances from just the last 24 hours… we now have to select and copy the whole message, paste that whole message into Apple Notes or some other text editing app, and then select and copy the text we want.
And this same emoji optimization limitation also applies to selecting multiple messages. So if you have a huge crybaby design tantrum on Messages and you want to copy the whole thing and dump it into a Design Grouch blog post, you have to copy and paste it line by line.
All this so lazy jackasses can more conveniently non-reply to messages with ❤️.
To that I say🖕.
One reply on “Selecting message text”
[…] But this morning I was trying and failing to use this iPad Pro to edit some text. It is appallingly bad at text editing. So I was having a loud crybaby fit about how if Apple wants its crappy gadgets to be useful tools for professional content creators, perhaps it should, after a decade and a half of negligence, improve the iPad’s text-editing. Maybe it would be appropriate for a professional content creation tool to be optimized for real writing, not teeny-bopper chatter. […]