OpenClip Could Bring Missing Copy and Paste Feature across Apps to iPhone

December 2008

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iPhone Copy And Paste Feature - Open Clip

We have been waiting for Apple to introduce the Copy and Paste feature which has been surprisingly missing ever since the launch of the first generation iPhone.

A student developer, Zac White, is trying to change this by unveiling a standard called open-source solution: OpenClip for other iPhone application developers to implement in their apps with the aim to bring the Copy and Paste Feature across iPhone applications.

Apple has acknowledged that iPhone copy and paste is in their roadmap, but the feature hasn't got the priority to make it to any of the firmware updates since iPhone's launch a year back.

We have already seen quite a neat implementation of the Copy and Paste feature by MagicPad's developers which only had one drawback that was it worked only within the MagicPad application (as expected).

We also have a workaround in the form of iCopy by Preston Monroe who had developed a bookmarklet called iCopy that gives you the ability to copy and paste text or URLs within Safari on the iPhone.

OpenClip is not an iPhone App, but it is a standard which developers can incorporate into their iPhone applications. It would mean that all participating iPhone developers will be able to use the copy and paste feature across their applications. So far there are no applications available that support OpenClip as of now but Zac has indicated that American Heritage Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus applications, Twitter client Twittelator, finance lexicon Wall Street Worlds and MagicPad will be released soon using this standard.

Those of you who are wondering how he is planning to implement it then here are some more details:

iPhone applications are allowed to read from other application's files but only write to their own. By creating a shared location for each application's "clipboard", applications can "copy" by simply saving data in this shared location and "paste" by pulling the most recently saved data from this share location. Zac claims this does not violate Apple's SDK rules.

You can see the video demonstration of Open Clip in action to get an overview on how the copy and paste feature will work across applications:

OpenClip is great initiative by Zac and good news for iPhone users but the success of this standard will depend on how many iPhone developers use it in their iPhone apps and the popularity of those apps.

At the end of the day, I would like to see a system-wide Copy and Paste feature from Apple as some of the top iPhone applications are Mobile Safari and Email and if there is no copy and feature in these applications it just isn't good enough.

Your thoughts?

[via Mac Rumors]