For brand new iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users
iPhone copy and paste
There have been a number of posts over the past week about the new Clippy (no, it’s not the Microsoft animated character) and hClipboard that are now available for the iPhone.
Clippy (beta) is a extension to your existing keyboards with the iPhone. When you hit the 123 button, a new item is added to the top of the keyboard with COPY and PASTE buttons and a small area to see what you copied. To use you simply tap and drag the magnifier and the iPhone will highlight your text. Hit the copy button and what you copied is added to the clipboard.
Clippy doesn’t work with all keyboards, and only allows you to copy one thing at a time – but it will copy from one app to another.
Heres a video of Clippy in action:
Taking a look at Clippy Beta
hClipboard however looks to be a more complete solution. Based on the keyboard system within the iPhone hClipboard allows you to swap out the keyboard with an interactive clipboard. You then have different buttons to perform the copy and paste. It’s not exactly an elegant solution, but it does allow you to copy multiple things to the clipboard before pasting them.
Take a look at this walk through video:
hClipboard - a walk through
Summary
Many people are saying that these two apps are two of the biggest reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. I’ve just taken a look at both and am confident neither is a reason to jailbreak my iPhone. Why? Neither is really a nice elegant solution to this issue.
I like the simplicity of Clippy and to be honest once this is refined it may well be a reason to jailbreak, but hClipboard just seems clumsy and bloated. Clippy is almost intuitive – in fact a small change to it would make it the ideal solution.
Why should I have to trigger COPY and PASTE through a keyboard change? Why can’t I simply drag the magnifier to trigger it? Clippy already knows I’m dragging as it highlights your copy in any keyboard – but I have to switch to the number keyboard to hit copy, why doesn’t it automatically show those buttons when copy is selected?
Copy and Paste – isn’t going away anytime soon, I’m 100% sure that Apple have 2 or 3 working solutions in their Labs too – so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out next.
Install
If you would like either of these apps (well neither is really an app, they are more or less additional keyboards) head to Cydia and find them in there (take a look in recent Changes as they are currently there).
Both may require a respring as they install new components you may not have yet.
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2 Responses to “iPhone copy and paste”
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Badges of honor
I found hClipboard to be really amazing and versatile in a lot of c/p scenarios (that I usually find myself in) but I agree that it does lack the intuitiveness that Clippy has. I really expect Apple to be putting a solution for its users that vest into its products to surpass the Cydia world… Currently Cydia is ahead of the curve.
Just tried out Clippy, and it makes life a lot easier! And the added feature of being able to quickly delete a large tract of text is very easy!
Copying phone numbers and addresses from emails into your contact fields, or vice-versa is now easier, although still falling short if you want to copy multiple fields from contacts to an email without opening and closing each app more than once.
And no noticeable slowdown in typing, although there is a bit of lag when selecting text, definitely bearable though.
Take that, Apple!