Two Neat New iPhone Things

Adam “Sandwich” Lisagor links up two new iPhone projects: MagicPad, an iPhone note apps that offers multiple fonts, text selection, and cut/copy/paste; and MultiTouch.framework, an upcoming Mac OS X framework that lets you use an iPhone as a multitouch input device for your Mac.

I think MagicPad has gone in the wrong direction. I don’t really care about the multiple typefaces and font sizes, but their UI for text selection is wrong. The gesture they’ve chosen is single-tap-and-drag — but that’s the standard system-wide gesture for just moving the magnifying glass around. So it’s both inconsistent with the rest of the system, and it prevents you from moving the insertion point with the magnifying glass in any way. (Also, they could just do text selection a whole word at a time, like when you double-click and drag on the Mac. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about character-precise accuracy with your way-bigger-than-a-single-character fingertip.)

★ Wednesday, 30 July 2008