The Palm webOS development book from O'Reilly is coming out chapter by chapter. We've already seen the overview in chapter 1, Application basics in chapter 2, and Widgets in chapter 3. Well chapter 4 is out, and jhoff80 in our Palm Pre Forums gives us the low-down.
The big news: we now have more detail about how text manipulation works on the Palm Pre. We already knew that we will have access to cut and paste via the main menu, but the exact details of how it all will work on a more granular level were unclear. See: the Pre uses a capacitive touch screen, so selecting an exact spot is rather difficult. The iPhone fixes this issue with a magnifying glass that pops up on touch-and-hold, but what about the Pre.
Well, it's actually quite nice:
- You can hold down the Alt key to go into "Trackball Mode," which lets you swipe to move one character at a time. You can do the same with the shift key and it will select text as you swipe.
- There is "Smart Deletion," whereby you can hold down the delete key in order to delete an entire word.
Best of all, there is some sort of Auto-correct feature. jhoff80 notes that one example is auto-capitalization after a period.
There you have it, folks, the Pre can handle text quite well, thank you very much. And our Palm Pre Forums can handle your insatiable desire for finding Pre details ...thank you very much, forum members!
Update: As Blackhawk5 in our forums mentions, the YouTube video after the break -- shot by PalmInfoCenter -- briefly shows the Shift-select method.
Comments
Some auto correct, yeah. Prolly WinMo style re punctuation. But I've seen people noting the email shown on one of the recent Pre snapshot leaks quoting it as "Damn this thing catch typos."
I think what it actually said was "Does this thibg catch typos." Which would be a no. Then again, aside from autocaps, I've never been able to stand any level of auto-correct, so +1.
these are not really features. dumbphones have done this for years, it's just standard.
cars have wheels. but the wheels aren't features.
"breaking news: new sedan from tesla motors has wheels!"
Holy crap, they do???
iPhones are coming out with features that have been around forever too and people get excited. Don't rain down on the Pre parade yet.
Palm is not Apple and Pre needs to beat iPhone hands down.
The Pre does it better than the iPhone.
Why are we always trying to compare it to the iPhone, its not even a smartphone... Is there a wonder that a 13 year old won the 1,000,000,000th download??? ;-)
it was music and that age is a large market of who buys music. You are skipping iphone's hundreds of millions in revenue from age 25 to 35
For the record, I don't think of it as a major distinguishing feature, just something that we now know that we didn't before. I think I'd still prefer a 5way instead of just a button myself, but at the same time, like I said in the original forum post, at least it sounds like they've thought through text navigation some with the mention of this.
And it was actually mentioned in chapter 3, not chapter 4 which was released last night, I just only got around to reading it last night. Chapter 4 was all about "Dialogs and Menus" for the record.
As for the auto-correct, I hope it's not too stubborn like it used to be on my Treos. I don't know how many times I tried to say "well" only to get "we'll" or "IM me" to get "I'm me".
This is oooold, saw the video eons ago. Also, this ain't nearly as easy as my 680 with TreoSelecText software.
I'm not sure how this addresses the issue of precision. It seems to show that, once you click on the wrong area, you can swipe your way over to what you MEANT to click on.
Sounds like I'd prefer the iPhone solution, involving a magnifying "glass."
Still, it's good to see.
Agree with Westman. This sounds like an attempt to get around the problems caused by the capacitive screen and the lack of a 5-way or trackball. The old Palm had it's problems, but it rarely sacrified function for form. A trackball would be a major improvement.
OK fine give cutnpaste one-handed operation like clipPRO.
This story exists because iPhone did not have cutnpaste like for years.
It seems you have to have the keyboard open to do way too much for a phone whose keyboard slides out, and slides out only in portrait.
true on the keyboard thing. 2 things come to mind. One there will be on screen keyboards available asap I'm sure and on a limb and a hope but I doubt maybe no one could hold the pre cause the keyboard slides then turns.... I wish....
can you text with a on screen key board like the htc touch? does it have t-9?
how do forward text messages?
Install the patch. Then click the text message.
HOW CAN I FORWARD MY TEXTS MESSAGES PLEASE HELP A EASY WAY
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