I just filed the following as rdar://8231424 ("double-tap to select a word is sluggish in long documents"). I'd have mirrored the bug on Open Radar, but I don't have time. Maybe later.

Summary: Double-tap selects a word instantaneously if keyboard is off, but with a long delay if keyboard is on.

Steps to Reproduce: In the iOS Notes app, edit a long document (mine was 8K, about 600 short lines). Make sure the keyboard is active. Double-tap a word to select it. It takes a second or two to select the word. Since there is no visual feedback during that time it is not clear whether the double-tap was detected, and whether it was done in the intended spot. Now tap "Done" to deactivate the keyboard and double-tap a word. Now the word is selected immediately.

Expected Results: Immediate selection of the double-tapped word.

Actual Results: A delay of a second or so.

Regression:

Notes: I saw this on an iPhone 4.

I originally saw this when editing a todo list in the Notespark iPhone app. (I have a todo list that was intended to be a quick "do it now" list but grew to 8K and 600 lines, so you can see how good I am at getting things done.) At first I blamed Notespark, which hasn't been updated in a long time so I guessed maybe Apple had changed the text APIs and Notespark simply needed to modernize. But I saw the same problem in Simplenote and Apple's own Notes app. This is with iOS 4.01.

I see the problem does not happen on my iPad — double-tap always selects the word instantaneously. I don't know if this is because the iPad has faster hardware, or because it's only running iPhone OS 3.2.1.

Speaking of modernizing, I really, really want a version of Notespark for the iPad. I'd pay a couple of bucks for it. Notespark says they're looking into it, but I don't understand why there would be hesitance or delay. Maybe they don't see sales numbers justifying the development cost? Maybe I'm underestimating the effort to design a good UI around the larger screen space (I'm thinking of the conflict resolution UI)? All I know is, I would switch to a different notes app in a minute if there was one that supported three-way merge and had an iPad version. I haven't researched this lately, so maybe there's a competitor I don't know about.

That's something else I don't understand — why nobody else but Notespark seems to think merging is important. Maybe I use notes apps differently from most people.

Maybe I should finally get my iOS developer chops up to speed and offer to do the work for free.