Skip to main content

Chapter 28 - A 1-touch text editor for phones and tablets. Exercise 1) - zapping words

                       

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

Guten morgen, Schatz!
Danke, meine Liebe!
What have you got for me today?
Well, I wanted to show you how one single Connective Editing button obeying a simple instruction, has got all the other editing apps for handhelds beat - and as a matter of fact it's even snappier than what's normal on a regular sit-on-your butt computer.
Wow... I'm all in.
Actually, you ARE! Because this new single instruction will be the new DEL. And any app would be foolish to ignore the wonderful ease and power it offers. But then...
But then... ?
I want to be on a keyboard too!
You do?
Yes, I want to marry you and live on an extra keyboard row with you.
Have you been smoking something, Juula?
Absolutely not. I never do that stuff.
Right, sorry... I didn't mean it that way.
I want to join you and be a second button that completes the new DEL. Then if we have children, the DEL and JUULA family can revolutionize editing.
I love it.
I know it sounds crazy, but I can prove it to you. Anyhow, first let's start with just you. The new DEL. It looks like this: [§] - section symbol inside square brackets, and it obeys this simple instruction:

THE [§] INSTRUCTION

The [§] button checks the value immediately to the left of the cursor, and then cancels to the right up to and including that same value, case insensitive.

The [§] button is amazingly versatile. For starters:

  1. [§] deletes words at a single tap and allows for successive word deletions like an automatic pistol. Just tap [§] at the head of a word and you'll zap it. There's no more reaching up to the screen. No double-tapping to select, no backspace, no micro-corrections to cancel eventual double spaces. Faster and with less anatomy involved than a computer.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...

Chapter 26 - For scribes and writers, the biggest design fail came from the best designer of all time!

                      THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Hi Del, how are you feeling today?" "Still kicking, Juula." "Where were we?" "You were talking about the 4 main reasons for bothering to select text, which on handhelds, is mostly done by dragging mini-handles - a real bummer." "Right. For writers and scribes, it represents the biggest design fail of all times. Sadly foisted on humanity by the greatest design genius of all times." Minihandles! - Yecch! "All right, let's focus on deletion. Remember this?" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas "Yes." In the preparatory "selection" phase, before effectuating the obvious deletion, it becomes this:" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox →Christmas "What do you notice?!  "For deletion, the only text I'm interested in is the one just beyond the end of the selected words!...