Show HN: Weekend Project - SlideWriter for iPad

Looks really good! I think it would be useful if a two finger slide moved the cursor by word boundaries as opposed to speeding up the cursor. For example, in your video around the 1:00 mark, you two-finger swipe to get to the end of the line, but fall short by a couple of characters. If you moved by word boundary, then mistakes like this would be much less common. (I would suggest that when two finger swiping backwards, you move the cursor to the beginning of the previous word, and when swiping forwards you move the cursor to the end of the next word, much like how option left/right work in any Mac text area field).

Seems like quite a few developers are starting to adopt this idea, which I think is great! There's already a jailbreak version that was done a few days ago (<a href="http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/05/04/swipeselection/" rel="nofollow">http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/05/04/swipeselection/</a>)<p>I've been in contact with Daniel Hooper, who originally came up with the idea and made the video posted other day, and he says he's happy to see people adopt it in their apps. I think Daniel deserves a great deal of credit for putting this idea out there in the open instead of patenting it like some large companies might be tempted to do.<p>I've been implementing this functionality in my own word processor, UX Write, and will have it included in the first version when its released in the next few weeks. I've posted some details on my own implementation at <a href="http://www.uxproductivity.com/blog/2012/05/05/text-selection-on-the-ipad/" rel="nofollow">http://www.uxproductivity.com/blog/2012/05/05/text-selection...</a><p>I noticed that in this video they have a separate button above the keyboard for triggering selection, instead of using the shift key like in Daniel's demo. I ran into some conflicts with the shift key between my own gesture recognition and the built-in keyboard logic, as I suspect the developer of SlideWriter did too. The separate button looks like a good solution.

Great stuff!<p>How difficult would it be to have the sliding gestures on the keyboard itself? Keeping my fingers at the same place would make things even faster...<p>Also, have you tried experimenting with acceleration curves for moving the cursor - i.e. moving the finger slow would yield a 1:1 cursor movement, while moving the finger faster would move the cursor something more like 8 times faster than the finger. With the right acceleration curve, the two-finger gesture could be dropped, and you could be even faster.<p>I'd love to use this in the editor of my choice. Could you make this open source?

In addition to submitting it to the App Store as a standalone app, I'd highly recommend componentizing your work and selling the source or a library through Cocoa Controls or BinPress.

Awesome solution for something I never thought would be possible without a jailbreak!<p>However the icon for the slide button could be better and simpler to understand. Maybe by showing a standard slider.

looks nice. was it somewhat-inspired by the video going around that demonstrates faster cursor movements by sliding fingers over the keyboard?<p>after a selection is made, it might be nice to pop-up cut/copy/paste options automatically (unless it does that and i missed it).<p>when will it be available to the general public?

Simultaneously developed as a Cydia plugin called SwipeSelection: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/06/editing-text-on-your-ipad-speed-up-the-process-with-swipeselection/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/06/editing-text-on-your-ipad-s...</a><p>Works on iPhone as well, and is available now.

I think i was sold with the nujabes background.<p>Great work by the way!

Awesome! Sent you guys a tweet, would love this on my iPad<p>Sent from my iPad

Are you going to put this on github ?