If there is one thing that every iPhone owner has been waiting for, it has got to be the ability to copy and paste.
As a rule, virtually every other smartphone on the market today has this function as standard, and it still baffles many as to why the most popular phone around doesn’t have this function. Well, as of yesterday morning, this dream was realized in the form of Clippy – a Cydia app that allows the user to indeed copy and paste between several apps.
It is currently in beta stage, but impressive nonetheless. It seems to work quite well between the stock iPhone apps such as Mail, SMS, Notes and Safari. It also works on a few App Store apps, but remains a little buggy. One example of this is its compatibility with Beejive, which it seems to crash.
The main obstacle in its present state is that you must have the text editor open for it to work, i.e. be writing a text message or an E-mail. In the example above we are applying copy and paste to an E-mail, for which you must first select “reply” so that the editor appears.
There is another feature that some may see as a hindrance, whereas before you could drag your finger across a line of text to navigate from one end to the other, now it highlights the text for copying, but if you wish to overwrite a section of text you can highlight the desired section and simply continue typing and it will remove the highlighted segment.
Overall it is a massive achievement in an area where Apple has so far failed to deliver, and although it needs to be developed further to achieve its full potential, it still remains the closest anyone has come to a viable copy/paste tool for the iPhone (web-apps aside).
Credit to Ryan Petrich for his work on this app, and lets hope we see some exciting updates in the near future.
awesome!
Works in everything just as said, but I can’t copy from a text message received; although I can paste into a outgoing text message
Doesn’t seem to work for me – it just reboots each time – no matter what I try.
It also works in calendar mode, but you do have to edit an event to copy/paste. This is well done for an out of the box beta release. Perhaps he could sell it to Apple and make all those no-hackers happy.
How the heck do you get it? It’s not showing in Cydia…
Good job on Scooping me on this story Fable.
I have been in direct contact with Ryan since the day this came out. He is working on some issues to improve the function of “Clippy” and to make it even more user friendly.
He has also with 24 hrs of CLippy done something miraculous and unheard of till today….Ryan came out with a theme pack called “Live Time”. Live Time, actuallya creates an animated, yes….ANIMATED Clock Icon on the springboard. The Icon Actually keeps correct time on the analog clock, sencond hand and all. So let’s see what new things he comes up.
So stay tuned.
Jesus was that poorly written, but you guys get the gist. Broken English and all….
Has anyone gotten this application to work on version 2.1? I think it’s a great application but for some reason it will not work on my iphone – could it be because I am on 2.1????
Can someone please advise? Thanks and thanks to Ryan for his great work.
Sorry guys I should have added that it was designed exclusively using 2.2 f/w. Also their have been 2 updates since and another feature I have noticed is that if you visit a site and want to copy/paste the URL, you just tap on the URL bar and it highlights it ready for copying.
Uh….Works on mine and I am still on 2.1 firmware….
So much for that exclusivity thing you’re talking about Fable…
“designed exclusively USING 2.2″ not designed exclusively FOR 2.2.