5 ms·

The number of "native" apps where I discover I can select and copy UI elements because it's all actually HTML...

brundolf 4y ago
Yeah. You can prevent that too with a CSS property, but again, it’s not the default; you have to have enough time and attention to detail to go out of your way and handle it
- hedora 4y ago
  My favorite feature in recent iOS is that you can defeat that CSS property by taking a screenshot and letting the phone OCR the image, then copy paste from the result. Disabling copy is abused by all sorts of apps. (Yelp street addresses are a prime offender.). I’m not convinced allowing it to be disabled is a net positive.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    It’s fairly essential for things like buttons and tabs that get tapped all the time and have mostly non-content text. But it does need to be used sparingly
magnio 4y ago
Isn't that a good thing? Text should be selectable and copyable by default, since that does not induce any harm whether the user do it or not, but the reverse is not true. The number of times a Windows UI shows me an non-copyable error code is vastly greater than the number of times I wish I cannot select any text (which is zero).
- blub 4y ago
  The copied content is often mixed nonsense like a comment combined with a button text. How often do you want to copy button text like “Ok”, “Cancel”, etc? Never…
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    It's pretty handy when reporting an error or bug. Often the text is more involved than ok/cancel.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I don't know about the Windows 10/11 UWP stuff, but in any good version of Windows you can hit control+c on any standard dialog to copy the error text and the text of all buttons to your clipboard. It's a little annoying that you can't easily make subselections in dialogs, but that's been a core Windows UI design element going back to Windows 1.0. It's a grossly underadvertised feature of Windows and I bet the people reimplementing the Windows UI for the third time in ten years don't know about it either.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  On iPhones at least with latest OS, using built in OCR is supposed to be especially easy now. Maybe that has been exaggerated now, but if it is a one step thing, that could be better than being able to copy as copying stuff sometimes includes things you don’t want and can’t exclude.
Y-bar 4y ago
This used to be the norm on older versions of Mac OS, and that was good. It would help enormously when writing blog posts (e.g. copy the descriptive text somewhere rather than transcribing it) or searching the web for the content of a en error message that popped up.

Yeah. You can prevent that too with a CSS property, but again, it’s not the default; you have to have enough time and attention to detail to go out of your way and handle it

hedora 4y ago
My favorite feature in recent iOS is that you can defeat that CSS property by taking a screenshot and letting the phone OCR the image, then copy paste from the result. Disabling copy is abused by all sorts of apps. (Yelp street addresses are a prime offender.). I’m not convinced allowing it to be disabled is a net positive.
- brundolf 4y ago
  It’s fairly essential for things like buttons and tabs that get tapped all the time and have mostly non-content text. But it does need to be used sparingly

magnio 4y ago

Isn't that a good thing? Text should be selectable and copyable by default, since that does not induce any harm whether the user do it or not, but the reverse is not true. The number of times a Windows UI shows me an non-copyable error code is vastly greater than the number of times I wish I cannot select any text (which is zero).

blub 4y ago
The copied content is often mixed nonsense like a comment combined with a button text. How often do you want to copy button text like “Ok”, “Cancel”, etc? Never…
- jessaustin 4y ago
  It's pretty handy when reporting an error or bug. Often the text is more involved than ok/cancel.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I don't know about the Windows 10/11 UWP stuff, but in any good version of Windows you can hit control+c on any standard dialog to copy the error text and the text of all buttons to your clipboard. It's a little annoying that you can't easily make subselections in dialogs, but that's been a core Windows UI design element going back to Windows 1.0. It's a grossly underadvertised feature of Windows and I bet the people reimplementing the Windows UI for the third time in ten years don't know about it either.
skinnymuch 4y ago
On iPhones at least with latest OS, using built in OCR is supposed to be especially easy now. Maybe that has been exaggerated now, but if it is a one step thing, that could be better than being able to copy as copying stuff sometimes includes things you don’t want and can’t exclude.

Y-bar 4y ago

This used to be the norm on older versions of Mac OS, and that was good. It would help enormously when writing blog posts (e.g. copy the descriptive text somewhere rather than transcribing it) or searching the web for the content of a en error message that popped up.