iPhone Copy & Paste Tease…

The more I use my iPhone, the more I just want to cry or scream at the lack of copy & paste functionality.

Last night I was on my way to the home of a new acquaintance for a Labor Day BBQ. I’d put his address in my calendar entry for the party, but hadn’t yet made an address book contact for him. Once on the road, I wanted to bring up his location on Google Maps on my iPhone. (No, I wasn’t driving.) I found that, unlike in the contacts database, you cannot click on the address in the location field of an iCal entry to map the location. ARGH!

So I had to open the calendar entry, quickly memorize the address in the “location” field, switch to the Maps application, and enter the address before I forgot it.

Dumb. Yes, I want calendar entry locations to click over to maps. But even more generally, I want iPhone cut and paste!

Then the universe began to tease me, cruel fiend that she is…

By chance, I learned today that there’s an open-source hack called OpenClip that sort of provided iPhone cut-and-paste between applications — until Apple broke it with the latest iPhone firmware update, that is.

Here’s how OpenClip used to work:

Cut and Paste for iPhone from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

…Shortly afterward, my friend Sarah Dopp tweeted about this brilliant video mockup of what iPhone copy & paste might look like, if it existed:

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

Cute. Real cute. I’m going to bash my head against the wall a little bit now, thanks.

In the meantime, here’s the iPhone copy & paste tool I’m continuing to use:

How can Apple NOT think copy & paste is a priority for tweaking the iPhone? Grumble….

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on September 2, 2008 at 4:13 pm and filed under mobile, problems, tools. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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5 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

I agree – cut/paste and linking Calendar and Maps would help make the iPhone do a couple of things that could reasonably be asked for. Overall, even though the maps app is really great (and was 80% of the reason I bought the phone) the product still feels like it’s not ready for prime time, lacking some basic functions a device like this should have. Can’t say I’m too bitter about dropping more calls in a week on ATT than I did in seven years total on Verizon, or near-constant powering-up and down to re-connect to a signal – mostly I am wary that Apple seems to be the 1984-style Big-Brother entity it was purportedly “smashing.”


1. Sal on December 14th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Love ur writing style, but, Amy, perhaps this is a tad bit whiney. I know, I know…ur entitled. U R from PDX, afterall.

But here is an idea whose time came in the ’80’s: List features that u find important for tech use, and then shop.

You are SO smart, it shows. Why do u jump into bed with a gadget before you even know what it is? Because it’s so very handsome in the well-adjusted lighting of a media u know oh so well?

GF, you got played if you paid ur good bread for a trinket that only is pretty, pretty, shiny, shiny.

Amy Gahran reply on September 3rd, 2008 3:01 pm:
LOL, good to know that this blog has a readership among the barely literate demographic.

OK, if anyone else assumes I “just jumped in bed with” the iPhone, guess again. Read the archives here. I thought long and hard about this, and even tried a much more costly option first (the N95, which was a bitter disappointment).

- Amy

PDXsays reply on September 3rd, 2008 3:37 pm:
tsk.. insulting ur readership is no way to get hits, Amy.

After all, we are all doing this on the fly while we scrub for a living.

So, how DID Ms Wunderkind miss out on teh lack of cut/paste features d she did her homework?

Amy Gahran reply on September 4th, 2008 7:29 am:
Hey, insulting me is no way to inspire a civil response.

If you’d bothered to read the archives, you could see that I was aware of many iPhone shortcomings before I bought it. It still meets most of my needs, and it’s more reliable and economical than the N95. That doesn’t mean I won’t lobby to get those shortcomings corrected, since companies only correct problems when enough people complain about them.

And what’s with the “ur?” Having trouble passing 7th grade for the 5th time?

- Amy

2. PDXsays on September 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Hey Ricky,

Actually, I blasted the N95 for:

1) BRICKING MY PHONE with the very first attempted firmware update, just a couple of days after I bought it. It got shipped with old firmware (a problem I didn’t have with the 3G iPhone)

2) Having a ridiculous “warranty” that offered no local service and would have had me wait up to a month or more to get my phone back, after shipping it out at my own expense, no loaner available in the meantime

3) Costing an exhorbitant amount of money

4) Having an obtuse windows-only firmware update process.

I acknowledged from the start the the iPhone is far from perfect in many respects, which is why I put off buying one and why I tried the N95 first. Nokia let me down badly. The iPhone is at least usable, flexible, affordable, and it works. Also, if anything does go wrong with it, I can bike to the Apple or AT&T store and get a replacement, repair, or loaner.

All of which is much more than I can say for the Nokia N95. Is the N95 a better-equipped moblogging tool? Definitely. But is the iPhone a more dependable package that suits more of my needs on a daily basis? Definitely.

Nokia is shooting themselves in the foot in the US market, IMHO. which is, as I’ve said many times, a damn shame.

- Amy Gahran


3. Amy Gahran on September 3rd, 2008 at 8:14 am
Interesting that you blasted the N95-3 for not getting timely updates, in favor of the iPhone, which gets updated relatively frequently, specially in the smartphone world. However, the N95-3 already allows you to do everything that you wanted it to, such as copy/paste and others, even without this update. However, the iPhone, which is updated more than any smartphone on the market, is STILL lacking the features that people have been requesting since the beginning.


4. Ricky on September 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 am
Great post. I know my life will be complete with iPhone cut & paste.


5. donna papacosta on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm