Editing Text On Your iPad? Speed Up The Process With SwipeSelection

More than a few people have been clamoring for Daniel Hooper’s thoughtful iPad text editing concept to become a real thing since his video started making the rounds, and now all you mobile text editors have reason to celebrate.

Thanks to the efforts of an intrepid iOS hacker named Kyle Howells, that awesome vision of quick-and-painless text editing has been realized with a new (and free) iOS tweak called SwipeSelection.

Even if you aren’t a seasoned grammarian (or a beleaguered copy editor), SwipeSelection strikes me as terribly useful tool to have at your disposal. Instead of having to poke at precisely the right point in a word or sentence to fix an error, SwipeSelection allows you to drag a single finger across the iPad’s keyboard to place your cursor.

Need a bit more speed? Drag with two fingers to add some extra oomph to the process, which comes in especially handy when you’re grappling with a more than a few paragraphs.

Useful as SwipeSelection is, it’s worth nothing that it’s not a one-to-one manifestation of Hooper’s vision. As it turns out though, that may have been for the best. Hooper’s original video has users holding down the Shift key while dragging their fingers in order to select text — hardly a dealbreaker, but why use two fingers when just one will suffice? Howells instead chose to have users select snippets of text by starting their drag from the Shift key, making the editing process even quicker.

It probably goes without saying, but here I go anyway — your iPad (or iPhone, or iPod Touch) won’t be able to handle usefulness of this magnitude unless it’s jailbroken. If you’ve already taken the plunge though, SwipeSelection is free and waiting for you in Cydia as long as you have access the BigBoss repository added.

[via iDownloadBlog]