The iPhone’s one serious lack for me is the lack of cut, copy, and paste. It makes replying to emails a pain, because I like to trim unneeded quoted text, and interleave my comments, the old Usenet way (also known as “the better way”). But no easy block cutting of text, and no easy copy and paste, make this really annoying. A thread over at kottke.org had suggestions of how to implement selecting and cutting text. Here’s how I would do it.

Like a couple of folks suggested there, the Newton clipboard UI was really nice, and I’d mimic that. Selected text is just dragged to the edge of the screen, where it shrinks down and floats there. Multiple clippings can float in multiple places along the edge of the screen, and there’s no problem with invisible clipboard contents.

But for the selecting of the text, no one thought of what I think is a decently neat solution. Press and hold to get the loupe, and place the text cursor. Then do a two finger short drag down, to mimic a quotation mark. That changes the cursor to a select cursor, and then loupe to where you want to put the endpoint, and do a close quote, again a two-finger short drag down. Voila, using a text metaphor (and multitouch) in the process. Ideal for the iPhone.

You can float a temporary trash can in the lower right, if you want to cut the text by dragging it to the trash. Or you can just hit the backspace key on the keyboard. In any case, I’d like to see a clipboard for the iPhone come out soon.

posted 1:45 am | 2 Comments