Pastebud Aims to bring Missing Copy & Paste Feature to the iPhone

November 2009

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Pastebud Aims to bring Missing Copy & Paste Feature to the iPhone

A new service called Pastebud aims to bring Copy & Paste feature to the iPhone between iPhone's Safari browser (across tabs) and iPhone's Mail app which has been surprisingly missing ever since the launch of the 1st generation iPhone.

So you will finally be able to copy text from iPhone's Safari browser to the Mail app and also between web pages and the best part is you don't need to jailbreak your iPhone or need anything to be installed and its completely legal.

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.

CopierciN was another attempt to bring the missing feature to iPhone users, but it did not add copy & paste functionality directly to other applications. Its a text editor which also includes an importer/exporter mechanism which allows iPhone users to import text from and export text to SMS, Notes and Mail applications.

It is a native iPhone application that can be installed only on a jailbroken iPhone using Cydia, the installer application for the unofficial iPhone apps (under BigBoss repository, in Utilities section).

Pastebud is the latest attempt to bring the missing feature to iPhone users. It is a new service which makes clever use of javascript to bring the copy and paste functionality to the iPhone. Charlie Sorrel over at Wired explains how it works:

Pastebud works by combining two Javascript bookmarks (named, of course, Copy and Paste) with some online web-service jiggery-pokery.

What appears to be happening is that the Copy button takes the URL of your current web page and opens it in Pastebud's site. Once there, it looks like some Ajax-y scripting allows you to highlight text. This is then copied and can be pasted into another web page.

It also looks like the standard "Mail Link to this Page" functionality is hijacked to insert the pasteboard text instead of the page's URL.

You can checkout the video to get an idea on how it works:

The Pastebud website and the new service are currently not available but expected to be launched tomorrow.

You might have noticed that there is an annoying pop-up asking you to upgrade to make things more convenient. I am assuming that you will be paying the $5 upgrade fee to get rid of the annoying pop-ups.

So if you can't wait for Apple to release the much needed feature on your iPhone it might be something you can consider.

I will keep you posted here at iPhone Hacks when this service is available. But until then let us know what you think about this copy and paste solution for the iPhone?

Update:

Pastebud Released; Also Includes Feature to Copy Contents from an Email

[via Wired]

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