> why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI
I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.
The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.
Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
This is why technology is becoming garbage. In 2025 instead of copy paste, we fire up a gpu in a datacenter. it feels like "software engineering" is just becoming a BS contest for "how much AI can we shoehorn into everything"
Not fully disagreeing, but this lack of copypaste is not an intended ai feature.
- The “magic ocr thingy” exists for things like taking a picture of the real world and grabbing text from it, or grabbing text from a video from something you saw recorded there. Think translating a foreign sign or whatever.
- interfaces have, for unrelated reasons, become more hostile to standard actions like copypaste.
As a result people end up having to ocr-scan interfaces with the tool.
Some of it is because how people interact with and use tech has changed.
Mobile users have completely outpaced laptop/desktop users, and mobile users don't think in terms of files and text, so to them copy & paste is less important. The mythical "average user" moves arbitrary text and data around using screenshots and screen recordings instead of text and files.
Yes, it's incredibly inefficient, but I think it's evolved that day because selecting text is a real pain on a small touch screen, and companies have been trying to abstract away any concept of a filesystem for a long time.
So you or I might care and be bothered that we can't copy & paste something from UI chrome or content in a "web app" but the average person won't care, they'll just take a screenshot.
"E commerce apps" are very much not the sort of traditional desktop application they were referring to. Note that they add "in badly designed mobile apps, I often do."
They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note.
In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.)
(Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.
The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.
Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F