Although many bugs have been fixed and many features have been added to the iPhone’s OS, two key features remain missing, copy and paste. Until Apple adds in their own copy and paste method, the problem has been solved thanks to the wonders of javascript. The “app” responsible for these features isn’t really an app at all, it’s a bookmarklet, which allows it to avoid the App Store. Two bookmarks, or bookmarklets in Safari control the actual copying and pasting, with the text selected able to be sent to both Mail and the clipboard. Once text is highlighted and copied, either a mail document or another web page to paste the text in is found. Once found, the “paste” bookmarklet takes care of the rest, highlighting areas in which the copied text can be pasted. Select the area, and the text is automatically pasted from the clipboard.
Of course, this doesn’t seem like a permanent solution. Hopefully, Apple will be implementing copy and paste sometime soon. In the meantime, this service, provided by pastebud, will have to do the job.
This is really cool. The copy and paste methods are really important. By the way, I also find Microsoft has put their apps on iPhone App Store: http://www.bloginfor.com/2008/12/microsoft-has-put-their-apps-on-iphone-app-store-just-a-beginning/
There's already an app called MagicPad which offers copy/paste. It once got a $8.99 tag but now its currently free for a limited time.