The lack of Copy/Paste functionality on the iPhone is one those items I like to rant about, especially given Apple's stance that they are working on it but don't see it as that important. What frustrates me is the lack of any thoughtful reasoning or comment why copy/paste is not included, the fact that they have been working on the right gesture combination after more than 2 years of design and development does not wash. If the architects at Apple don't feel that Copy/Paste is necessary, at least educate me why I don't need it....
Anyway, the lack of the feature has created a cottage industry of designers and even an open source Software Development Kit called OpenClip which developers could include in their application. The problem is that OpenClip exploited a security loophole which Apple closed in version 2.1.
Now another group has developed a very innovative mechanism called Pastebud to copy and paste between Safari web sites as well as the email application. Pastebud cleverly uses two Java scripts (COPY and PASTE) saved as bookmarks in Safari to perform the copy and the paste functions. To bookmark the two Java script applets in Safari, you follow the instruction on the Pastebud web site. Once you complete the saving of the bookmarks, you are issued a personal email address which you save in your contacts. This email address allows you to copy from the email application using the pastebud email server as the clipboard which allows the Safari PASTE Java script to paste from.
The process of copying selected text from Safari to an email is simple:
Open a web site like My Digital Life in Safari.
Access your bookmarks and select COPY.
This bring up the web site inside the Pastebug Safari web application. Select all is set by default, however if you only want to copy a subset of the text slide your finger across the desired text. The selected text will be highlighted. Tap copy in upper right hand corner, then to paste the text in an email tap the write icon in the upper left hand corner.
The email application is launched and the text is pasted in the email body.
If you wanted to paste the text in another Safari web application like Typepad's web application (not the app store application), instead of tapping the write icon, you would access the Typepad web application, create a post, tap the body area, bring up bookmarks, and select PASTE.
And voila!
This is a wonderfully well thought out functionality with only three downsides:
- It requires you to be connected, the clipboard uses pastebud's servers.
- It currently only works works with Safari and email, but I don't see why it could not be included in other applications.
- The clipboard only supports text right now.
Pastebud is free but you can donate $5 (I have) which will help continue the innovation and get rid of the tag line inserted in the pasted text...The bottom line is that the simplicity of this solution is what makes it great.
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