this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Voyager

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I understand if this is beyond your control, but I'm comparing my experience in Voyager with my experience in every other iOS app.

Text selection and cursor placement in a text field in Voyager is so inaccurate and frustrating. I try to pick up the cursor and a word on another line gets highlighted. I try to tap a word with a red line under it and the tiny replacement selection AND the context meant pop up at the same time. I try to deselect something by clicking on blank space and the selection cycles through menus with each tap before clearing, then tapping the same blank space one too many times reselects the text and I have to cycle and clear the menus again.

This has been a problem since I started using Voyager, and I feel like it's gotten a little better over time, but it is still a very different experience from a stock iOS app that is very responsive and accurate when trying to use my fingers to select something only a few pixels wide.

Is Voyager calling native APIs for typing and selecting text or is it something custom? If possible, could you just use what Apple provides and make typing fields as vanilla as you can? I've tried getting used to it, but it is exhausting some days.

Not to make you feel bad or anything, but this was never a problem with Apollo. So I feel like it should be solvable. But if this is something you've tried fixing in the past, or you're just having to chip away at it little by little (like the issue with videos interrupting scrolling) I understand and will try to be patient.

Voyager is still the best Lemmy viewer out there, and I hope it keeps getting better. Thank you!

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[–] aeharding 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah text select on iOS safari is pretty glitchy.

On iOS I have two suggestions:

  • use long press space bar to move cursor
  • double tap word to start highlight, then change selection with grab bars
[–] aeronmelon 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Waitaminute... is the Voyager app a webview?

[–] aeharding 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] aeronmelon 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I knew you can access Voyager from the web, but the App Store app is just a wrapper around a website?

I guess that explains the finicky text selection. Which means you're beholden to Apple's updates to Safari.

What would it take to get you to write a native iOS app? ☺️

[–] Zachariah 3 points 9 months ago

I didn’t realize you could do the cursor move that used to be force-touch or whatever they called it. This may just save my sanity. I’ve needed this feature back in every iOS app for a couple years.