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[Richard Gaskin]

J. Landman Gay wrote:

 > I think the solution has to be in the engine. I'm in trouble.

Even if you find a workaround, I hope the engine team understands that 
it's a workaround, and has interest in letting us work in ways that are 
far less strangely counterintuitive that having to wrap a field in a group.

Same with buttons (why do we have five different ways to make one 
control type), and so many things on mobile.

Yesterday in the forums a new user was asking about copy and paste on 
mobile, something we understand doesn't work with LC's built-in fields 
(along with a good many other things), but new users expect LC to behave 
as well with mobile development as it does for desktop, and the need to 
type out control definitions like we're C programmers stuck in 1993 
while using what is supposed to be be an easy drag-n-drop GUI was barely 
acceptable as a short-term workaround when LC first jumped into mobile, 
and now a decade later it's maddeningly mystifying.

So I tried to explain the situation as nicely as I could:

     LiveCode's built-in field object have not yet been expanded
     to integrate with mobile OSes as it does on desktop platforms.

     In addition to clipboard support, you'd eventually discover other
     shortcomings using those on mobile, including nonstandard UI for
     text selection.

     LiveCode does offer support for mobile-native fields, however,
     using the script interface described in the User Guide and this
     lesson:
 
http://lessons.livecode.com/m/4069/l/29112-how-do-i-use-native-text-controls-on-mobile


To which this new customer replied:

    Right, so that's sorted by using a native input, and letting the OS
    deal with text and copying.

    That feels like quite an awkward solution for a paid license of a
    product with heavy focus on mobile development, but it did solve
    the problem at hand, thanks for the info FourthWorld


I agree with him. It is at best awkward.

LiveCode is nearly unmatched for making desktop apps, but for mobile 
development there are so many unfinished edges it's barely a contender 
for anyone not already heavily invested in LiveCode from desktop work.

It would be reassuring if the LC team could share with us their plan to 
finish their mobile implementation, to deliver a user experience on par 
with its best-of-breed desktop workflows.

If that's not a goal that's useful to know as well.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com