copy and paste

Why Apple iPhone Copy and Paste is mostly unnecessary

Friday, August 22nd, 2008
by lepton

Everybody seems to be begging for Apple to put select, copy, cut, and paste into the iPhone and iPod Touch. But when you think about it… there isn’t much you really NEED it for.

Sure, sure, you want to copy and paste text in your word processor, to move a paragraph here and there. And, you want to copy some stuff out of an EMail to paste into a note. And, I might want to copy and paste stuff around in this WordPress blog post as I edit on my iPhone. But frankly these are not very common things to be doing on an iPhone. The things that you DO commonly need to do can be handled by other means.

Would you like to copy a picture out of a web page and save it? You can do that already. Touch and hold the picture, and a menu pops up offering to “Save Image” to your Photos application. Want to EMail a photo? Display it in Photos, touch an icon, and a menu pops up offering to EMail the photo, or to send it to a MobileMe gallery. No copying, no pasting, no problems.

It’s the same with many things you might be using copy/paste for on a lesser computer. Save the sender of an EMail message into a contact? There’s a menu command for that. Call a phone number you spot in an EMail or web page? Touch it and the iPhone offers to call the number in one step.

Enter the Data Detector

The last example, calling a phone number that is in an EMail or Web page by touching it, illustrates a feature in Mac OSX known as the Data Detector. The iPhone simply recognizes the text is a phone number, and turns it into a live link that, when touched, will offer to make the call. And this is much better than selecting the phone number, copying it to a clipboard, switching to the phone application, pasting it in to the phone keypad, and making a call.

We don’t need copy and paste so much as we need commands and data detectors to do the same tasks in a single step. We need Apple to expand the data detectors and to add some more commands.

Look, don’t worry. Apple is going to add select, cut, copy and paste into the iPhone. In some cases, we flat out need it. But why did Apple say adding this was a low priority? Because it is not going to be elegant. We need it for a fallback, but it might not be pretty.

How will the mechanics of selecting text work? What guesture will perform a “Copy” or “Paste”. It might take a bit of finger dexterity. It might take more than a sentence in a pamphlet to explain it. It might not be very intuitive. Apple hates this kind of stuff, as they should.

So the priority might be to put in a few more commands, a few more data detectors. This would handle many cases where you would be copying and pasting, intuitively and elegantly.

For example, if a phone number appears on a web page or EMail, data detectors recognize it and you can call it with a touch. But type a phone number into the Notes application (or any other) and it isn’t recognized. You can’t touch and call it. So my suggestion is allow this detection in all text fields.

Did you know that there are several data detectors in your Mac’s Mail application? In Leopard Mail, look at one of the EMail messages you’ve received, for a date and time anywhere in the message. Hover the cursor over it, and you will see a gray box appear around the date and time, with a little drop down triangle in it. Click that triangle and a menu appears - “Create New iCal Event…” and ”Show This Date in iCal” appear as commands. A date data detector recognized it and lets you do common tasks with it, no copy/switch/paste necessary. Try hovering over a name that’s in your address book. “Show in Address Book” is available. Over a phone number, you get “Create New Contact” and “Add to Existing Contact”, Hover over an address and you get those plus “Show on Map”.

This is the sort of thing I believe Apple is wanting to put in our devices. Elegant, intuitive, easier. No weird gestures, no multiple steps, no learning techniques. We will get copy and paste, but most people need data detectors and commands much more.

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