Posts filed in ‘Essay’
Suggestion for an iPhone special-case copy & paste function
iPhone 1.0 really didn’t need a clipboard for two reasons:
- there weren’t that many content generation apps that could take advantage of a clipboard, and
- those that did had custom functions that allowed you to move data around, for the most part (e.g., attaching a photo to an email from within the Photo Album).
With the advent of the App Store, all of a sudden there are a myriad of apps, many of which would benefit from the ability to have data shuttled to and from them. Take the WordPress application, which I’m using right now to type this post. I’d like to provide hyperlinks to resources that are related to this post, but short of hand-typing them in, there’s no way for me to embed a link. Let’s say that after I finish this post I want to share it with the Twittersphere. Again, short of manually typing the post URL into Twinkle (my iPhone Twitter client of choice), there’s no way to perform this action. On more conventional computers, copy & paste would easily do the job. But copy & paste on the iPhone warrants deeper analysis, as the iPhone is hardly conventional.
Copy & paste is a multi-step process: select something, hit copy, move your cursor, and hit paste. The problem that Apple is faced with is in that very first step. Usually to select something, you would drag your mouse cursor over some text. On the iPhone, this gesture has been assigned to a different function: dragging scrolls instead of selects. Apple seems to be stuck on what to do about this dilemma. However, not all copy & paste tasks require fine-grained selection. I’d be willing to bet that most of the time, a “special-case” selection would suffice.
People move URLs around a lot, so how about a button that copies all URLs that are visible on a screen to a clipboard? The user could then switch programs, touch a field, hit a paste button, and select a URL to paste. Alternatively, there might be a button that copies all text out of an active field, and another button to paste the text into a different field. Since many fields are less than a sentence long (e.g., email addresses and note titles), even if you wanted only a portion of what was copied, it would be easy to delete what you didn’t want after pasting. These two mechanisms would easily take care of the problems I mentioned above.
The best part about implementing special-case copy & paste is that it doesn’t reserve any interaction gestures for its use. All it takes is an application developer to place a button on screens that are likely to benefit from clipboard functionality. Apple can then take its time to design a more general way to provide copy & paste, and not have to worry that it will conflict with special-case copy & paste.
Every new application that’s released will potentially exacerbate workflow issues caused by the lack of an iPhone clipboard function. A special-case copy & paste is a pragmatic near-term solution that can enable inter-application workflows and provide time for Apple to do the the proper human experience testing on a more general solution.
Yes I’m still here
An acquaintance recently wrote to tell me that I suck at updating my blog. I agree with him—but I have an excuse: I have a very short attention span.
Okay, so I didn’t say it would be a good excuse, but there you have it.
Ideas always pop into my head at the most inopportune times. It usually happens when I’m stuck, or have writer’s block. I use to make myself focus. I would write the idea down, file it somewhere, and then try to forget about it. A little voice in the back of my mind would always tell me that I’d never finish anything. Regardless, I could never re-focus, and would end up wasting a lot of time anyway.
Recently, I figured that trying to focus on my current task was a stupid strategy. It’s hard enough trying to build motivation to do something, and here I was trying to suppress it.
These days, if I get excited about something, I work on it. As for the project I was working on, I just have faith that I’ll get back to it. If I don’t, then maybe it wasn’t that important.
This blog is one of those projects. I don’t want to stop writing it, but then again I don’t want to feel I have to write it. That takes all the fun out of it. This time, the release of the iPhone SDK has me busy. But don’t worry, I’m still around.
I do have another image in the works. My dad recently bought a Seattle Mariners collectable train set. The image is about half-done, but when I finish it, I’m sure I’ll have something interesting to post. In the mean time, here’s the partially finished image to whet your appetite.
No insightful forethought here
Does a blog have to start out pretty? Get the design together, maybe make a nice logo, and then launch with a bang, right? I suppose you might need to do that if you’re trying to impress someone. Fortunately, in this blog, I’m not. Currently, you won’t see a thought-out custom design or logo, just some text and Kubrick, the default WordPress template. This is because my projects have a tendency to become held up by design. And because lots of them also get stuck there, I’ve decided to post now instead of later. I’m not sure doing so is such a bad thing anyway; perhaps for certain things, design doesn’t have to happen up front.
Up-front design makes a lot of sense when it’s expensive to produce something, like a car, or a complex software program. But what about when change is cheap, like on this blog? Maybe you don’t need an up-front design. For these things, design can (and perhaps should) be evolved.
You might be thinking that I’m just being lazy—and I’m not going to deny that; you’d be right. But there’s nothing better than when the right thing to do is also the lazy thing to do.
One of my original intents for this blog was to show you how some of my photographs are built from their raw materials. I figure that if I’m showing you how that’s done, it wouldn’t be too far off subject to show you how the blog itself develops. With that in mind, I will be taking snapshots of the blog as it changes during its lifetime. That said, here’s the first one:
Okay, so now I’m off to write the first worthwhile post to this blog, one that actually has something to do with photography. If you by chance run across this page in your random internet wanderings, I’d love for you to leave a comment. It’s always nice to know that I’m not just shouting into the wind.