Just when you thought we were making progress on the iPhone copy and paste front, Apple has gone and crashed the party. We posted a few days ago about the open-source project OpenClip and their ingenious way of placing saved text to copy from application to application within an open zone that could be accessed from every part of the iPhone. There were also a lot of developers that were planning on using the solution in their upcoming releases, including Twittelator, WordPress, Dial Zero, and more.
But oh how quickly things can change. With the release of Apple’s iPhone 2.1 software, the solution that OpenClip has devised to copy text and information from application to application will be no more. Apple will allow data to be stored inside applications, meaning that copy and paste will work fine within one app. OpenClip has posted information on their website, saying:
However, even though Apple is killing the concept behind the current OpenClip, that doesn’t mean we can’t change the concept. A shared clipboard could be stored in an Address Book card or even on a remote server. Those solutions aren’t as good as the OpenClip implementation, but they aren’t bad.
Even though this comes as a bit of a disappointment to the OpenClip community, the developers have stated that they’re not surprised that Apple has decided to nix this kind of activity as more of a security feature than anything. The lead developer at OpenClip says, “Even though I debuted to concept before the newest beta was release, I’m sure Apple had been planning to kill this kind of thing for a while”. We still remain hopeful that Apple will come up with a solution for this overlooked option in a software release soon.
