All Articles Tagged cut and paste

PCalc developer James Thomson is one of our favorites because he not only makes great apps, but he seems to love doing it, and always figures out new, positive, and productive ways to get our attention.

This time around it isn’t just the release of an iPhone 3.0 compatible version of PCalc for iPhone ($9.99 – iTunes link) that includes support for copy and paste (and a couple of new vertical button layouts, one for engineers, one for programmers), it’s how he built one version of the app that supports both iPhone 2.2.1 and iPhone 3.0 at the same time. An iPhone version of Apple’s “universal binary” concept, as it were.

We’re not sure he’s the first to do this — and according to Twitter he isn’t either — but we hope he does write up the process when the 3.0 SDK NDA (non-disclosure agreement) lifts so other developers can do it as well. It’s an elegant solution to say the least.

Now to see if we can not only paste some complex calculations… but understand them!

Back before the iPhone, I was using one of GRC.com’s long, pseudo-random passwords for my WPA-protected Wi-Fi network. Typing it into iPhone 1.x, even iPhone 2.x was a non-starter, however, so I shrank it down considerably.

Similar security-conscious folks have lamented not only the lack of copy and paste on the iPhone, but especially the lack of “paste-into-password field” to support just those kinds of super-secure strings.

Well, it looks like we might be getting them — along with the previously discussed copy and paste features, in iPhone 3.0.

Whether this makes it or not into the final release version is something only time will tell (because Apple, of course, isn’t saying).

But we want it.

Our sibling site PreCentral.net has gotten their mobile accomplishers on yet another (rumored to be) leaked internal document. This one supposedly comes from Sprint and details what, to PreCentral.net, are some interesting factoids. To us, however, they represent some far more interesting questions:

• The picture above shows what looks to be fairly user-toxic troubleshooting steps for Pre and memory management. While the iPhone has memory issues as well, you either reboot or restore. Here, steps are approaching the level of finicky task management and triage Apple has made fun of in previous iPhone keynotes.
• Tethering looks to be gone, which may be a bad sign for iPhone users hoping AT&T would throw it in when OS 3.0 — which enables it — rolls around this summer.
• Also, no cut and paste from web pages, which is interesting given that webOS is based on web 2.0 style pages. Shouldn’t that one be a gimme?

For much, much more, check out the source blog and let us know how the Palm Pre is developing, competitively to the iPhone, from your point of view. (Of course, we won’t know any final feature set or functionality levels until it actually ships… sometime before June 30).

As widely rumored (yep, Kevin Rose was right!), Apple announced Copy and Paste today for iPhone OS 3.0, with “cut” relegated to apps that support it (?).

It works differently in different apps, this is what we can figure out:

Mail & Notes (and 3rd party?): double tap to begin. Drag small delineator icons to start and end of text string you want to copy.

Safari (and embedded browsers): Tap and hold to begin. Selects blocks of text.

Photos: Tap the action button to begin. Select multiple photos to paste into email. (Unknown if Apple will scale or compress before sending?)

Universally, it appears you can shake the iPhone to undo which while gimmicking, is also all kinds of awesome. You can also select paragraphs by holding your finger down on them, and Copy and Paste WILL pick up HTML including text formatting and links!

[Photo via Apple Insider]

UPDATED 2: As commenters have pointed out, Rose doesn’t say “no MMS”, he says he doesn’t know about MMS. He does say Apple is not providing Video Recording due to technical limitations: writing too frequently to the NAND Flash memory would burn it out. (While it’s true writing to NAND is destructive and thus, there are limited write cycles, Dieter tells us devices like the HTC Touch Diamond and Sumsung Omnia allow writing to internal storage, so who knows?). Basically, the gist of Rose’s rumor is that iPhone 3.0 will have Cut/Copy and Paste, and “Palm Pre”-like features…

UPDATE: MacRumors has posted slightly clearer details on Rose’s description of how cut/copy and paste works, along with a link to the video (NSFW-L):

Double-tap to bring up a magnifying glass with two quotes, you drag quotes around text string to select, and then you can cut/copy and paste.

ORIGINAL: Kevin’s back. Back again. Digging iPhone rumors. Tell ya friends! Not iChat Mobile this time, unfortunately, but Gizmodo is reporting that during his SXSW live Diggnation, Kevin Rose – who’s flubbed almost all iPhone rumors, but nailed iTunes and iPod nano scoops — put it on the line again for iPhone 3.0 pre-Preview Event:

• Cut and paste (as previously rumored) using double-tap to zoom and activate, pinch boundaries, then options pop up.
• “Palm Pre” features. (Could that be integrated social network contacts, unified messaging, better notifications, multi-tasking?)

Also, what will NOT be included?

• MMS (despite previous rumors)
• Video recording

What do we think? Will Rose be right or wrong this time? Tuesday’s just under two days away!

Prior to Macworld 2009, Daring Fireball mused openly about how neat it would be for the iPod Shuffle to get voice functionality, and on Wednesday last it did. Now Gruber is reminding us that his “wish-list” for iPhone OS 3.0 includes:

a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the ass. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is — you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe — pretty please, Mr. Forstall, with sugar on top — copy and paste.

But is this really a wish-list, or a (somewhat disingenuous?) way of passing along actual, leaked information on the new OS? MacRumors seems to think the latter, saying they have reason to believe a new SpringBoard, Push Notification (or Background Tasks), and Cut/Copy and Paste will indeed be on the iPhone OS 3.0 feature list. For good measure, they’re also tossing in magnetometer support (i.e. compass functionality like the Android G1 enjoys).

Added to yesterday’s rumors from Boy Genius about MMS and Tethering, however, and we’re afraid things are lining up just a little too much like a 3.0 panacea for iPhone’s previous OS “greatest misses”. And if that’s the case, it might be expectations — rather than notifications — that get “pushed” for next Tuesday’s iPhone OS 3.0 Sneak Peak. (We’re nothing if not fickle audiences, after all).

So, are these really inside information on what we’ll be seeing come March 17? Or are these truly more wish-lists than feature-lists?

(And are we waiting on Kevin Rose to add Mobile iChat to the 3.0 mix?)

What’s that? iPhone news at MWC09? It’s true. I just got back from a meeting with DocsToGo and they showed off an early version of their app. So far Word document editing is a go, Spreadsheet editing is definitely in the plan but not quite up and running yet. They’re tossing in document viewing for both plus PDFs as well — which means you can have all of your documents in one spot.

Read on to find out how it all works, where the iPhone kinks are (since Apple limits what developers can do easily), and how we’re loving their implementation of (in-app) Cut and Paste! Read the rest of this entry »

Two years since Steve Jobs pulled the original iPhone from his pocket at Macworld 2007, and still no cut/copy and paste functionality, and none in sight. Head of iPhone Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiack famously said it wasn’t a priority. Still, we’ve seen both the similarly capacitive touchscreens, Google Android G1 and BlackBerry Storm, show off versions of (multi-)touch based cut/copy and paste. We’ve also seen some magnifying-loop-based proof-of-concepts and independent end-runs around the omission both via shared frameworks and JavaScript bookmarklets, but still nothing official, nothing from Apple.

One sometimes bandied-about suggestion as to why the iPhone still lacks cut/copy and paste is because Apple hasn’t figured out an elegant solution. They want a simple gesture that can be used quickly, easily, and consistently in any app, and is as intuitive to the user as pinch to zoom.

Well maybe we can help them out. If we want to see iPhone OS 2.3 at Macworld, or even iPhone OS 3.0 at WWDC in June 2009, how should they do it? What gestures should they use? What procedure should they implement?

If you were Steve Jobs, striding down the deep, dark sub-basement hall to the secret iPhone development lab, how would you tell the terrified techies to “just make it work”?

The previous attempt to make an end run around the iPhone’s lack of cut/copy and paste involved shared code called OpenClip and relied on a loophole Apple closed in iPhone OS 2.1

This latest tilt at the text editing windmill targets only 2 apps instead:

Pastebud—as the service is called—works using two bookmarks in Safari. One prepares and loads the page you are viewing, ready to select text at the touch of a finger. From there, you can copy any text you want and create a new mail message with that text in it. In addition to that, you will be able to copy and paste in the text field of a different web page.

Check out the full story and video over at Gizmodo. And then let us know if you think this is enough — for now — to satisfy your cut/copy and paste cravings?

Back in August AT&T sent out a customer satisfaction survey to all iPhone owners. Well now it seems a new survey is being sent out to all of us on the AT&T network asking how the 2.1 firmware is working for us and what we want to see next on your iPhone 3G.

Now don’t get too excited yet! Just because they are asking what we want does not necessarily mean we will get it. Keep in mind Apple has stated before that certain features such as copy/paste and directional GPS take a back seat to other issues that need addressing so on and so forth. But it is better than AT&T and Apple flat out ignoring us right? So at least it is a start.

Apple Insider states:

The questionnaire asks owners to pick the top five hardware or software add-ons they’d like to see and include many of the most prominent requests made in the community, including cutting and pasting text, built-in instant messaging, Flash/Java support and MMS messaging.

So when and if you get this survey, be sure to speak your mind and let AT&T what know what you want. This is our chance… they seem to be listening. (Or at least they are pretending to be!)

[Via Appleinsider]