Why is the Apple website so decidedly incompatible with mobile devices?

Maybe the OP can eventually get some answers as to why all the oddness...but it may just be yet another ASC forum oddity...

Greetings, Bob! Wishing you and the family a great holiday weekend!

Same to Demo and the others here as well. 🙂

IIt's been like this for years.

^-- a 'mobile only feature'

If you use iOS here a lot then your keyboard dictionary will be polluted with these 'uppercase messes'.

'Settings > reset > keyboard dictionary' will delete all those, but it also clears out your common misspellings history too. Those are also synced to other devices via iClouds document & settings sync.

If you want to see them before you reset try opening ~/Library/Spelling/dynamic-text.dat on any Mac that sync to your iCloud in an app that can handle null separators (like TextMate2 - macromates.com). There doesn't seem to be any way to edit or fix these typo's.

As for the HTML button, it seems to come & go for me on iOS. I assumed it was a throttling issue - when the site gets busy it seems to disappear on iOS but I have never had enough access to understand if that is the case.

I don't think it will help (it hasn't made any difference so far - I reported it when it annoyed me years ago) but you can try the feedback page in the hopes that the discussions software will be fixed.

http://apple.com/feedback/maps_ios.html

Hello Drew,

60D807 seems to have uncovered the source of the problem in this other thread: Question for Levels 1 to 4.

There are simply some modes on ASC where there is no HTML button. 60D807 was using the Activity Stream, where the HTML button doesn't show up. That was one of the recent new features that was poorly received by many of us. It sounded like a good idea on paper, but for people answering many questions per day, it is very inefficient. But a "regular person" checking their own activity might just use that interface.

There is a bit of a tightrope to be walked when trying to make a mass-market device or service the way Apple does. Sometimes, they stray too far into making the system easy to use for beginners and take away the features that power users rely on. Then, when someone has a question about HTML editing in the Activity Stream, or pretty much anything involving iWork, there are no power users who know the answer because they have abandoned that particular area.

This is what people talking about when they complain about "dumbing down". No one objects to making something easier to use. Even power users appreciate that. The problem is when Apple imposes a hard upper limit on features. I wrote ASCPowerTools to help people get around those limits on ASC. But that is a risky approach because Apple can make changes that break such hacks, just as they did the other day with the relocation feature I had to remove. I used to be a big fan of iWork, especially Pages, but now Microsoft Office is the only game in town. Apple sometimes seems to think that people use Apple products because they just want to use Apple products, but that's not true. People use what works best for them. Even a discussion forum can fall victim to this. Compare Apple's Developer forums with Stack Overflow, for example. Which one is the joke? The only reason anyone posts on the Developer forums anymore is in hopes that an Apple engineer will come along and actually document something that they should have done years ago.

Is there anything that fixes the double caps on iOS Etresoft?

I give up editing in the browser on iOS because it is just an exercise in futility when this forum breaks what I type.

P.S.

If you are aggregating tools for making ASC usable, look at this tip I submitted…

Bookmarklet to fix AppleScript pasting on discussions.apple.com

Hi Drew,

I know of no way to fix the double-cap problem. You might try other browsers maybe.

These days I am doing more de-aggreating than aggregating. But I could add that to a future version of ASCPowerTools. I might want to add spaces after the "var" keywords though. 🙂

Try the Brightkey keybiard. No diouble caps and if you move the your finger on the spacebar you can move he cursor. You don't need to give it full access is you don't want to. You'll lose predictive type but I don'use it anyway.' I prefer it in blue.

Brightkey Keyboard - Designer Themes + PANTONE by Brightkey Limited

https://appsto.re/us/zHfx2.i

I like the idea of the spacebar control. However, I would never recommend the Brightkey keyboard. I just downloaded and installed it. The first thing it does is ask you to provide full access. There is no way on this earth that I would ever, ever do that. I like the idea of having keyboards, but on OS X, I know that tapping into the keyboard when using different apps would be a major challenge. Essentially, you need a key logger and those are easy to spot. On iOS, 3rd party keyboards are key loggers. You must assume that every login, password, and credit card number you type will be recorded. The only security you have is Apple's default setting of "Allow full access: NO". Any keyboard that immediately suggests you give it full access is HIGHLY suspicious. Fraud in the apps stores is rampant.

And finally, the Brightkey keyboard is even worse that Apple's built-in keyboard. Whereas with Apple's keyboard I have to go back and delete the double first letter, the Brighkey keyboard almost always deletes the entire first word I type.

Settings > Keyboards > Edit > Brightkey > Delete > Delete

I saw that in an earlier post & ignored it. As Etresoft said it's not really an answer…

It doesn't work on iOS below version 8 & I don't want to use other keyboards (with the security implications) to fix a problem created by the forum software.

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