Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.

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thehappyfellow 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

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leptons 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been.

It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.

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tambourine_man 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying

	▲	b112 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps: <BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!! <CosmicRay/#debian> haha <BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...
	▲	leptons 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well good for you, I guess?

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nashashmi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

they are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).

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abanana 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.

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leptons 3 hours ago | parent [-]

lol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s.

Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.

Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.

The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.

Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.

They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.

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muppetman 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.

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hollandheese an hour ago | parent [-]

Because Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder.

And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.

	▲	ethbr1 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can't think of a better rationale for the ubiquitous worsening of local search than increasing ignorance of comp sci fundamentals. There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function. ... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable. Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.

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anonymars an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh, you're going to mention a mouse without bringing up the puck?!

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hbn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.

What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.

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spockz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.

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OkGoDoIt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)

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hbn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links)

But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.

	▲	disillusioned 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful

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wonnage 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.