Cross-application copy and paste coming to iPhone

After a year of clamouring from users, the iPhone looks set to get a proper, cross-application copy-and-paste function. However, it’s not coming from Apple and – this might be the killer – it won’t work with Safari or Mail.

The OpenClip project is the brainchild MagicPad developer Zac White. We previously reported on MagicPad’s own ability to copy and paste, while pointing out the limited usefulness of the function being tied to this one app.

But with OpenClip, White has hit upon an elegant way for developers to incorporate cross-application cut-and-paste functionality, apparently without fear of breaking Apple’s rigid developer guidelines. More after the cut.

In fact, the idea behind OpenClip is blindingly obvious: developers simply work to an agreed, open standard to store copied information in a shared area of the iPhone’s storage. In this manner, applications featuring the OpenClip copy and paste functions do need not pass information directly to one another, which would indeed violate Apple’s iPhone SDK rules.

So, any application that implements the OpenClip standard simply writes copied information to the shared storage area and then, when the user exits and launches a different application, the second program accesses the same area of shared storage to apply the paste function. As we said, it’s an obvious idea.

However, while there are already several applications in App Store that have implemented OpenClip, it seems highly unlikely that Apple will be in any hurry to adopt the standard in Safari and Mail, so there’ll be no copy-and-paste fun in these applications just yet.

White is honest about OpenClip’s future, though, stating in his FAQ: "OpenClip is an interim solution. For full, completely-integrated, system-wide copy / paste, Apple will need to implement a solution."

[ OpenClip]