Daniel Hooper’s iPad Text-editing App

Daniel Hooper’s iPad was bugging him. Sure, it looked snazzy and ran smoothly, but every time he tried to write using the tablet’s full-sized keyboard he grew frustrated. Despite having direct cursor control, highlighting and editing blocks of texts was a chore. So Hooper, CM 12, did something about it.

Hooper has always been a tinkerer. He was one of those kids who’d take everything apart just to see how it worked. “Sometimes I couldn’t get it back together so I would just make something new with it,” he said. He once built his own Battlebot robot that featured a 7-inch circular saw blade (“My parents are great,” he noted). Then, in seventh grade, he discovered programming. He was hooked.

So, last year when he grew annoyed with his iPad, Hooper saw an opportunity to get inside the tablet and make it better. In other words, he wrote an app for that.

Here’s how, starting with his design work:

1. Identify the problem. The cursor was difficult to move.

2. Study the problem in context. Cursor movement happens often, and it’s intermingled with typing.

3. Identify the source of the problem. The user has to move his or her hands away from the keyboard and wait for the tap and hold gesture to activate the selection mode.

4. Design a solution. Hooper wrote code to detect when the user performed a gesture over the keyboard surface. When a gesture is detected, the app takes control of the cursor and moves it accordingly.

5. Implement. Hooper designed the app to look like the iPad’s built-in mail app so other developers and users could imagine what it would be like to use the gestures on their own devices.

Hooper posted a video of himself using the text-editing app on YouTube, and the clip was soon picked up by sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch and Business Insider. Within four days, the video had 500,000 views.