iphone interface designer tells the development story of iOS text selection function

In the iOS 3 system released in June 2009, the most important features are text copying, pasting and selecting text by dragging two pins on the screen. This intuitive design is much better than the other smartphone's ability to process copy, paste, and text selection. copying, pasting, and text selection are fundamental and important to the traditional computer user experience, and Apple's solution makes the feature as easy as it can be on a mobile platform.

The user interface Designer for the iOS text selection patent is Bas Ording, who worked at Apple for 15 years and left Apple last year. Ording has been involved in developing a variety of iphones, including the first iphone. In addition to the text-selection patent, he also contributed primarily to the appearance of the virtual keyboard prior to iOS 7, the page scrolling of the device-including the "bounce" effect of reaching the bottom or top of the page.

Ording explained that when iOS 3 was about to be released, every person involved in the development knew that text selection must be one of the main features. The problem is how best to present it to the user, in the 1990s Apple released the Messagespad through the trackpad to achieve the copy and paste function, but Jobs was very opposed to the stylus set, the iphone team did not take the trackpad into account.

"That is absolutely impossible," says Ording. I remember jobs telling us that if we needed a stylus to use the iphone, the product would not be released. The iphone's goal is to replace any touch tool by using a finger. "In the end, the iphone design team chose to have the option to start and end the text, and some people said two pins were" lollipop ". At the beginning, the two selected pins were large in size and later became more and more small, eventually becoming dots.

Interestingly, ording mentioned that when testing the iphone's text-selection function, he was using a larger screen size device, possibly an ipad prototype. It was 3 years before the iphone was released. The iOS text-selection feature is designed to make all screen-size devices work perfectly, and of course the small iphone is one of the priorities. The picture below is ording.

Jobs's pursuit of perfection goes far beyond the iphone's text choices. Ording said: "Jobs do everything by themselves, through their meetings every other week, according to the stage of the project, the frequency of the meeting is also adjusted." When we show the features that jobs is developing, including text choices, he's very concerned about the color of the text-selection bar and the faint shadows at the edges. He also made a number of suggestions for double-clicking the selection and determining the length by choice. ”

The concept of copying and pasting was not originally proposed by Apple, but the concept of this function is deeply rooted in Apple DNA. The first copy/paste concept appeared in the Xerox Research Center in the 1970s, created by scientist Larry Tesler, who also developed editable dialogue windows and Smalltalk browsers. When Jobs visited Xerox in 1979, he first saw the concept of copying and pasting. The feature then appears on the Lisa computer.

Later, Larry Tesler joined the Apple, and later he was promoted to vice president, but eventually left the company in 1997. Tesler is also a minimalist design and the main initiator of the concept of a single mouse. Tesler is also one of the inventors of the iOS text selection feature patent. The Apple text selection patent was submitted on March 4, 2008 and is a microcosm of many of the iphone's features, as well as the fundamentals and philosophies of Apple's design.

Manuscript: Macx