One of the most annoying things about the iPhone is its utter inability to copy-paste text. A feature that comes standard in almost all other phones, it has been intentionaly left out of the iPhone since day one, much to the dismay of iPhone aficionados. Even though a lot has been said about the absence of the feature, Apple doesn’t seem to be keen on adding it to their flagship handheld, claiming that it’s simply “not a priority at the moment”.
With the release of the official iPhone SDK, some amazing (and some really crappy) new applications have made their way onto the App Store. Developers are making full use of the iPhone hardware and coming up with innovative applications for its users. However, each developer has to abide by the stringent and restrictive rules laid down by Apple with regard to the SDK and the apps are thoroughly scrutinised by them before they are approved and made available on the App Store. Therefore, it had been assumed that copy-paste, if it ever makes its way onto the device, would have to come from Apple itself.
However, Proximi, the makers of MagicPad—a full blown rich text editor that allows users to cut, copy, and paste text within its various notes—have come up with a pretty decent solution for implementing copy and paste features on the iPhone. But since it only works within their own application, it wasn’t as well recieved as they might’ve imagined. Proximi also did propose a detailed and well thought out concept interface for systemwide copy-paste functionality but that’s about as far as they got.
Now, a student has come into the limelight by announcing a non profit, open source, and community powered project called OpenClip that claims to add the copy-paste functionality across applications. Zac White, the brains behind the framework, claims that all the apps which make use of the framework can fully support copy-paste. Interestingly, the app does not break any of the SDK terms and conditions.
Cali Lewis, from GeekBrief.tv, got to play around with early editions of a few applications that have integrated the framework.
Cut and Paste for iPhone from Cali Lewis on Vimeo
How does it work?
As Cali explains in the video, the framework makes use of free space on your iPhone’s memory. Applications using the framework are given read and write access to that memory space and use it as a clipboard. When you copy some text in an app, it writes that text to that memory space. Later, when you attempt to paste the same text in some other app, it reads from that memory space and pastes it. This makes it possible for different apps to share the clipboard without the need to have any background processes running (something the iPhone doesn’t allow).
What’s next?
Unless the iPhone coding whizzes at Apple decide to do something about this, I expect to see more and more applications going down this path. Apple has just seeded firmware version v2.0.2 which shows no signs of inching closer to building in copy-paste functionality. Even the beta seeds of the firmware version 2.1 have no idea of the wonders its sibling on the Mac desktop is capable of, courtesy copy and paste.
As long as this remains low on Apple’s priorities list, OpenClip seems like a pretty decent substitution, assuming it works as advertised. [Ed note: A big Smoking Apples shoutout goes to both Proximi and Zac White for not accepting Apple’s unsatisfactory reponses and figuring out ways to bring this much requested feature to the iPhone using masses. Bravo!]
