OpenClip to Bring Copy & Paste to iPhone

A student developer, Zac White, released a software framework to the Opensource community, in hopes to finally enable cross-application Copy & Paste on the iPhone/iPod Touch. He calls this framework OpenClip.

Zac claims that his framework does not violate Apple’s SDK rules. The following is a demonstration of the framework on some yet to release versions of iPhone applications.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1562944 w=400&h=225]

With the OpenClip framework solving the cross-application implementation of Copy & Paste, we now have to solve the User Interface (UI) of  implementing Copy & Paste within an application. Fortunately, the folks at Proximi had already gave it a good start. You can see their “Candidate UI for Copy & Paste on the iPhone” in the video below.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1447477 w=400&h=305]

They have even created the iPhone application MagicPad to demonstrate the Copy & Paste UI.

Although, at the moment Apple has said that the Copy & Paste feature is not high on their list of new features for the iPhone. Copy & Paste on a computer was made popular and important part of a GUI operating system’s interface by Apple. The reluctant of Apple to implement this feature on the iPhone, is not because they do not know users want this feature. It is because Apple wants to make sure every features implement on the iPhone are full-proof and usable by the wide range of iPhone users that exist.

In the past when 3rd party developers released solutions that is highly desirable, Apple had went in and purchased the feature/implementation directly from the 3rd party developer.

Case in point is HWPen which brought Traditional and Simplified Chinese handwriting input to the iPhone. Apple purchased the software and implementation from the developer, applied the Apple touch and then released it in iPhone firmware 2.0.

If adoption of the OpenClip framework and Promixi’s Cut, Copy & Paste UI become prevalent, may be Apple will participate in the OpenClip Opensource project by adopting its technology and acquiring the work from Promixi.

I am talking about this to help spread the adoption of OpenClip.

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