We have been waiting for Apple to introduce the Copy and Paste feature in iPhone which has surprisingly been missing since the launch of the first generation iPhone.
We are missing it so much that we still get excited (even after many false hopes) when we hear some news or rumors which hint that Copy and Paste feature could be coming to the iPhone in the next firmware release.
MagicPad is text editor app for the iPhone and is yet to be released. But what's interesting is, MagicPad's developers have implemented their own Copy and Paste feature which looks quite good.
MagicPad developers have implemented the Copy and Paste feature by changing the functionality of the magnifying glass. Normally, if you want to position the cursor in the proper location, you press and drag to position the cursor. While using MagicPad, when you press and drag over the text, you highlight the text for selection, so that it can be cut or copied.
They have also added a small toolbar over iPhone's on-screen virtual keyboard. After selecting the text, you can tap the right most button on the small toolbar which will popup three options: "Copy", "Cut" and "Paste clipboard". After you have cut or copied the text selection, you can use the "Paste Clipboard" button to paste the selected text into other notes.
You can checkout the video clip of how the copy and paste feature works with MagicPad:
They iPhone developers have done a good job implementing the copy and paste feature, I couldn't think of a better way to implement it in the iPhone except for a few changes.
One of the limitation is that the copy and paste functionality works only within MagicPad. When Apple introduces the feature, I would like to use this feature across applications, so that one can copy some text from iPhone's Safari browser and paste the content from the clipboard in the iPhone's Mail app.
Since you would not be using the virtual keyboard, while copying and pasting, I guess it would be more appropriate to keep it hidden and only show the small toolbar, as the virtual keyboard along with the small toolbar greatly reduces the real estate available on iPhone's screen as can be seen in the video above.
Your thoughts? How would you have implemented it if you were an Apple Engineer?
MagicPad is yet-to-be-released but if you want more details about the Rich Text Editor for the iPhone, follow this link.
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It's cool they were able to get copy and paste to work in an app. Now the better part would be making copy and paste work throughout the iPhone. I can't wait.
I just hope whoever made the Video Recorder app makes it available through App Store. THAT was one of my favorite hacked apps, but I wouldn't pay money for it so long as it was only a hack, since it would be wiped away with the software update. But now that App Store is here, where's Video Recorder, man? Come on, buddy!
You know you can already copy text from Safari browser to the mail application by setting up and using [url=http://www.biocow.com/iCopy/iCopy/url.
So not the best example, but real Copy/Paste functionality within the OS would still be good, lol and MMS and Bluetooth serial Port /scratched record