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Tell HN: iOS converts units for highlighted text

87 points by hprotagonist ↗ HN
What a great but deeply buried feature.

Select text like “450g” and scroll right on the cut/copy/paste popup, and enjoy the conversions!

49 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 99.0 ms ] thread
ulfw
Not the most useful thing in the world if one lives outside the US. The 'conversions' offered to me where: 450 g is "450 Grams" and "0.45 kilograms"

Yea ok.

sp332
It's location-based, right? (Hopefully!) Try: 2 pounds.
tylerchr
Heh, that gives “2.49 US dollars,” before the expected 907.18 grams.
francisjpo
Try with 2 lb. Pound is for money. Libra pondo is for weight.
kccqzy
It now says 2.50 US dollars. The exchange rate updates in real time?
philsnow
On mine you can keep scrolling to the right and I see “0.99 lbs”.
zamnos
If you're outside the US, you can select 0.99 lbs above and see what it is in metrics units. Weirdly though, 99 lbs doesn't offer a conversion.
morgunkorn
I get 44 906 g | 44.91 kg using the text in your reply, maybe it's a contextual thing?
dschuler
See Settings -> General -> Language & Region

Conversions will be into your preferred units set there.

jurip
Not really, or it has some pretty weird ideas about preferred units in my region. When trying to get a conversion for 1 cup, it tells me it's 0.5 pints. My region is Finland, language is Finnish, and roughly no-one understands those units.
lstamour
Weird. I’m in Canada and I see the following when I select “1 cup”:

0.24 L | 23.66 cL | 236.59 mL | 236.59 cm^3 | 0.0625 gal | 0.5 pt | 0.25 qt | 8 fl oz | 16 tbsp | 48 tsp | 0.00836 ft^3 | 14.44 in^3

My “measurement system” under language and region in settings is set to “Metric”. Perhaps yours is incorrectly set to “UK”?

I’m also running iOS 16.5 beta, if it helps.

codetrotter
Similarly I am on iOS 16.2 and have measurement system set to metric, my region to Norway, and my main preferred language to English.

I see the following: 0,24 l | 23,66 cl | 236,59 ml | 236,59 cm^3

It’s using comma as decimal because the number format is set as 1 234 567,89 as is default for region Norway.

It’s weird that mine shows the symbol for litres as a lowercase L and not as an uppercase L though.

newaccount74
The metric conversions are idiotic. Converting "1 cup" to 5 decimal places is misleading, and offering alternatives in l / cl / ml (with a capital ell??) is useless. The addition of cm^3 is the cherry on top :)

This was clearly designed by someone who has never used the metric system.

A human would convert it to "1/4 liter" or "250ml".

Edit: Actually, a human would convert "1 cup of flour" into "150g flour", since most local recipes use weight instead of volume for solids. Which shows that good localisation is a lot more than just literal translation + unit conversion.

Punavuori
Funny, for me the units shown are 0,24l and 23,66cl. (Also from Finland). OS language english, but locale Finland.
andelink
Wow nice find! I love little QOL features like this.
gnicholas
I have found the text recognition to be surprisingly mediocre. Even when the text is from a screenshot taken on the device, it often makes mistakes. Worst of all, it is overconfident and the text capture icon pops up all the time, leading me to think it will save time to copy/paste instead of trying to remember a string. I wish it knew its limitations a bit better.
quyleanh
Just copy lookup translate and share button. Nothing more
yumraj
Click on the “>” on the right side to expand
bayat
This is very useful, thank you for sharing. Not sure how much longer it would have taken me to discover it if it wasn’t for your sharing :)
abhaynayar
I feel that there's just so much stuff in iOS that's hidden (might I say unintuitive) compared to Android.
ghostpepper
I think some features just weren't meant to be discoverable. It's not like a feature this niche deserves a dedicated icon on the homescreen.
abhaynayar
Yeah I totally understand that we don't need to clutter the interface with features.

But for example, when you want to go to certain position in a text paragraph, it is super intuitive in Android to click on the text wherever you want the cursor to be. If you try that in iOS, it does that, but the precision is really really bad, like unusable. To precisely place a cursor in iOS you need to hold the spacebar. I know that, but I doubt the average user does, how would they? Even after knowing that, the Android way is much less of a headache.

I prefer Android in many such things.

dt2m
It used to work this way on iOS until they absolutely butchered the text cursor functionality with IIRC iOS 15.
filoleg
> in Android to click on the text wherever you want the cursor to be. If you try that in iOS, it does that, but the precision is really really bad, like unusable.

Try holding and moving that text pointer instead of clicking, that makes it super precise. Clicking is for rough, holding and moving is for very precise.

I agree that discovering the spacebar gesture on your own is fairly difficult, but the holding and moving feels easily naturally discoverable. You are literally picking up the pointer and moving it to where you want it, with continuous visual feedback throughout the process, instead of clicking and hoping it will land at the correct location.

sholladay
That’s all well and good. Dragging the cursor works. But the question remains, when you click in the text area, why doesn’t the cursor go where you clicked? I end up dragging it a lot more than should be necessary. Maybe they figured people make typos at the end of a word more often.
hn92726819
I can't imagine it's changed since I used it a few years ago. But it used to be that single tap only took you to a word boundary on iOS. So for example if you were to tap in between 3 and 4 in the text "1234567890", the nearest word boundary would be between " and 1. So you couldn't tap within a word but if you wanted to ditch a word it'd be easy to tap the right side of it to get to its right boundary.
filoleg
That's exactly how it currently works as well.
diebeforei485
It's meant to be shareable. So people can show this (and other tricks) to their tech-illiterate relatives and bond over things iPhone can do.

It's all documented in the user manuals (inside Books app) and the support pages. So I wouldn't necessarily call them "hidden" features.

LeoPanthera
I discovered recently that Mac Safari will translate text in images, as well as regular text, if you tell it to translate the page. Very useful!
thehours
TIL you can swipe to scroll on the pop-up (in addition to tapping the “>”).
asadm
I hate it that I cannot select a substring from a chat bubble these days in any of the chat apps. I just get an option to copy all of it.
DarthNebo
Apps like Instagram/Pintrest have just made the user feel blunt when they can't even select a snippet of text in the app, following hyperlinks in a comment...or even download media by right-clicking on the web-browser
PhilipRoman
To be fair this is not a new problem. Windows still doesn't let you select text at all in certain GUI contexts. Especially annoying when you need to copy an error message.
vxNsr
most error messages you can just click on the error window and press ctrl+c and then paste to your favorite text editor.

this works nearly everywhere in W10- that uses native code to display the error, I can't vouch for how well this works in W11 where they butchered everything

DarthNebo
Sure for native GUIs yes, but this was already something browsers supported & these apps just steam-rolled their 'keep 'em hooked & on platform' plan....I just lose patience when there's no slider on most doom-scroll apps either. Like c'mon....thankfully reddit still has it
lancefisher
It is so annoying! Slack in particular. I screenshot and then copy. Feels like a waste of compute as well as a hassle.
Tepix
Facebook is also really spectacular crappy to use on mobile safari in this regard.
rekoil
This is a problem to a degree even in Messages.app.

If a message consists of only a phone number for example, it's very hard to hit the pixel you need to long-press to copy it, otherwise all you get is phone number context like whether you want to call the number, create a contact, or add to a contact.

If you manage to hit the frame of the bubble you can get the context menu for copying all of it, but that's often quite hard in my experience.

ratchetbob
screenshot the page, and then you can use the iOS text extraction to select a substring :) (serious!)
ajonit
It is pertinent to mention that this feature is available starting from iOS 16. In iOS 15, however, it was limited to the spotlight search function.
divbzero
I hope the team that implemented this feature comes across this thread.
saos
Delightful that
M4v3R
It also works for photos/images! If you have text in your photo that contains a unit, you can click on the Live Text button in one of the corners and then on the unit itself, and you will get a conversion automatically. It works not only for units, but for currency too.
sph
That must have come with iOS 16, when they also decided to swap the "Look up" option with "Translate" for some unknown reason.

So dozen of times per day I am translating snippets of text per day every bloody time I want to search a term on Wikipedia or Google, and my muscle memory taps on the wrong button. Thanks, Apple.

TheLoafOfBread
On the parallel note, OneNote can do calculations i.e. write 123*456= and OneNote will automatically add result.