iPhone 1.0 really didn’t need a clipboard for two reasons:
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.