TaskPaper for iPhone quick feedback
I want to support multiple item (row) selection on the iPhone, but I’m not sure if there is a standard way to do it. On the Mac selecting multiple items is easy, just hold down the shift key. Does anyone know if there exists such as standard on the iPhone.
If there’s no better solution I think that I will reserver the far right side of the screen for multiple selection. So the normal behavior will match that of a standard list view… tap on a row to select it. But if your tap hits the far right side of the screen then the behavior will be to add the new row to the selection, or remove it if it was already selected.
Does that sound reasonable? Any ideas for how to let the user know what is happening?
Update Here’s the interaction that I’ve come up with.
I have a bottom toolbar item that when pressed shows a popup menu of items. All items in that menu work on the current selection… cut, copy, paste, etc. The interaction is to use that button like a shift key.
When pressed and held down it acts like a shift key, tapping on any row will toggle it’s selection status. (in normal mode tapping on a row selects the row and deselects all other rows).
A nice side effect of this is that as soon as you release the “shift key” you are presented with the list of commands to operate on the selection. So to quickly copy three items you would:
- Press the “shift key”
- With another finger, select the rows that you want.
- Release “shift key”
- Choose “copy” from resulting popup.
In 10 minutes of testing it seems to work really well.
