“Apple is aware of the desire for [Cut, Copy, Paste on iPhone] and it is working on it in the labs as we speak,” Sven Rafferty reports for SvenOnTech.
“The trouble it is having is implementation. How to easily call up a copy or cut option and then the paste action. It’s probable that the zoom bubble (the one that brings up the edit cursor) is the issue as it has removed the obvious tap and hold position from Apple to use for a pop-up menu of some sort. Text selection is another difficulty to sort out,” Rafferty reports.
“Certainly, the cursor could be added to the menu selection; however, Apple wants to keep this as simple as possible and that added step would not lend itself to simple,” Rafferty reports. “My source would not give me any details other than to say that it has been working on the solution for some time and that there was no immediate release for it. So at best, we can hope that the interface hurdle will be leaped over very soon.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dirty Pierre le Punk” for the heads up.]
In a recent email to Chris Pirillo, Brendan Sheehan suggests:
You know the magnifying loupe on the iPhone? Well to bring that up (as you know) you hold your finger down for about 1/2 a second at any point in a text box. Here’s the clever part… when you find the position where you want to start your Copy & Paste at you simply freeze, you hold that position (with loupe present) for about 1.5 seconds and the “navy” text selector within the loupe changes color to “green” (or any other color) right before your eyes. A subtle yet obvious clue that something is happening (i.e. hint hint iPhone user, you are now in select mode).
At this point all you have done is positioned the loupe and held it still for 1.5 seconds. So far so good.
Now, while your finger remains on the screen with the loupe present (as you would do with your mouse) you drag the text selector to the end of the piece of text you want, and you leave go.. and up pops all the clipboard options you’ll ever need; Copy, Cut, Paste, Delete etc. You choose an option and you’re done.
And when you want to Paste some copied text or a URL or something, you bring up the loupe and position it where you like, hold it for 1.5 seconds until the text selector turns green, and instead of dragging you just leave go and choose Paste for the pop up options.
Full article here.
LonelySandwich.com offered this possibility way back in August:
iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.
Apple is so idiotic. They INVENTED the concept of copying-and-pasting (and many other functions) through the use of drop-down menus in every program… and then they COMPLETELY THREW AWAY DROP-DOWN MENUS WITH THE iPHONE! You can’t have an advanced device without drop-down menus for your more advanced functions! Apple, just give us a drop-down menu at the top of the screen, and then you can add copy/paste and a whole slew of other much-needed functionality! This is just one of the reasons the Treo is still, to this day, a much more advanced smartphone than the iPhone.
“You can’t have an advanced device without drop-down menus for your more advanced functions!”
DARN RIGHT! And you can’t have a handheld device with a touchscreen with NO STYLUS!!! oh, wait…
They did kinda blow it on the iPhone/Touch. It should have been one tap on some text to place the cursor and 2 and 3 taps to select word and the whole thing. And then, yeah, pull down menus to cut/copy/paste/select all, etc. I don’t think they can use the tap and hold to bring up a “context menu”. That’s a Windows Table PC behavior that Microsoft may have patented.
Crap, you can’t even cut/copy/past files from the finder menu in regular OSX, so I’m sure they’ll at least come up with something goofy for the iPhone/Touch.
Can we ban Old Mac Man from making yet another comment about glossy screens?
Great video, although I feel the iPhone has neglected the obvious use of tongues to do much of the heavy lifting…….
Simply hold the phone firmly in one hand and throw it in the closest river. Then come to the realisation that you got sucked in, get over it and buy a phone that does what you want it to do.
This is waaay too complicated, and Jobs would probably agree with me.
A button for select text, then tap to select and then small buttons for copy and paste up at the top or bottom would be much easier to figure out for the average Joe. Holding one finger and then tapping another and all than junk is not intuitive.
These ideas are all well and good, but they’re all trying to shoehorn a desktop UI metaphor into the iPhone.
I think the whole concept of selecting a block of text and copying and pasting should be rethought.
The clipboard thing has always been less than ideal because it requires that you hold some awareness of an additional system mode in your mind (“What state is the clipboard in right now?”). Multi-clipboard utilities, while helpful in some situations, only complicate that mental chore further.
Don’t try to tell me you’ve never hit “Paste” only to get something completely unexpected, or you’ve never blown something away by copying over the existing clipboard contents.
How about eliminating the concept of a clipboard intermediary entirely, and along with it the need to do that initial “copy” step? Why, when I’m composing something, can I not simply tell it to fetch and suck in a block of text (or other content) from anywhere else in the system?
While we’re at it, let’s replace the need to drag tediously and meticulously across just the right letters/words in a block of text to get what we want. What about treating text as grab-able, movable, subdividable blocks (paragraphs, sentences, words, whatever) instead of a giant, wrapped linear “snake” like it is now? (Yes, I know you can double-click to select a word, tripe for the paragraph, whatever – enhance these and make them THE way to interact with text)
Just my 10 cents