Apple has to know that people are asking for this - right? It just seems weird that they intentionally left this most basic function of any computing device out of the iPhone OS.

NagChampa

@Rabid Penguin: Well... Could be be not simple enough..

takashimiike 3G edition

@lithivm: So Microsoft's subscription-based computing they've been talking about doesn't worry you at all?

Last time I checked, the iphone was perfectly capable of running unofficial apps with the jailbreak. And it's not like these are crappy, ghetto-rigged programs... The unofficial iphone apps are WAY better than the "open" windows mobile programs. Android in beta is also much more solid than anything from microsoft, and is more open-source than either of the other two.

lpranal

Wow, who didn't see that coming?

OpenClip was incredibly stupid (dishonest? attention-whorish?) when they claimed they managed to do copy-paste without breaking the terms of the SDK, when the terms clearly state you are only allowed to read and write from your own sandbox area.

hfutrell

Maybe Apple feels that Cut & Paste is too advanced for their average user base and doesn't want to confuse anyone, so they're just getting rid of it for everyone.

Rabid Penguin

I cant wait untill "insert name here" comes out so i can be completely in love with everything it does and know that there will be absolutely no problems with it and it will know exactly what i want and have it from day one and it will be free no no it will pay me to be in love with it and i wont have to work ever again.....man i cant wait. Can you?

elheeffa

I am sure Apple will make Copy&Paste very soon, no need to switch to get infected with Androids.

vgart

they're not intentionally "breaking" OpenClip's functionality. They are making it harder for potentially malicious programs(whether those apps are intentionally malicious or not doesn't matter, i.e., Aurora Feint's early implementation) to steal data from unsecure applications, by keeping those malicious apps from snooping other apps' data.

it's not the jerkface move you people make it out to be.

TonyRockyHorror

@takashimiike 3G edition: No idea, caught it on google news.

Bob1967

Apple has become BIG Brother... they have total control over the apps users can use on their hardware. Its a closed OS because if your exa. flashlight app is "too bright" they shut you down... if you can share your internet connection they shut you down....

I cant wait for windows mobile 7 to come out so I can ditch the iPhone 3G....

They had two updates since launch and I'm still getting locked out of my media every week.... they really suck

lithivm

@Bob1967: Is that real?

takashimiike 3G edition

Every day another reason not to upgrade and tie myself into them for another 2yrs.

Sticking with old one then I'm going Android but this looks promising......

[www.the01phone.com]

Bob1967

This actually makes some sense. What if you have an app that you have stored all of your CC info on. You wouldn't want another app that reports info to the web to be able to access it.

Sounds like a safety measure to me.

Carbonfly

Apple better be working on copy and paste them, not that i have a need for it on my phone but sometimes it's good to have it, i can't imagine living without it on my desktop

snitch29

What the hell is wrong with Apple? If they're going to ruin this, they need to provide it themselves. NOW.

Lev_Astov

@urbanturban666: so they can make an app that implements it and charge for it.... DLC is the wave of the future.

Daemonstalker

Is Apple retarded? First they remove that App that lets users use the phone as a tethered modem and now this?

takashimiike 3G edition

so why did they block copy and paste in the first place?

urbanturban666

@Bob1967: Vaporware or hoax. Check this link: [www.pause.com]

mildretard

"sandbox... fine-grained" See what they did there?

aseriesoftubes

@takashimiike 3G edition: They arent retarded -that is forgivable. They are stupid, which is something one aquires over the years.

Stacky Botrus

Who needs cut and paste? test your memory!

Joseph

it's seriously time for damn cut and paste. If we can't send/receive MMS like a normal FREE phone, then at least let me copy the stupid bullshit code and password AT&T texts me everytime someone sends me an MMS, and paste it into Safar. that way I don't have to flip back and forth b/w the text and safari to enter the mother fucker. Yeah, I'm throwing all sorts of bad words into this cuz i'm pissed about the MMS thing, lol.

tatiana.noel

Why is Apple so bent on making the iPhone Fort Knox? On a desktop Mac, developers can write nearly any program, I can install pretty much whatever I want, and apps can and do use data from all over the computer all the time. If they're doing it because of possible theft or loss, they just need to keep working on that kill switch, and add a feature where the user can activate bricking the phone remotely in case of loss or theft.

mcdj

@Bob1967: I think you work for the 01 phone company :)

Joseph

@Rabid Penguin: Maybe Apple feels that Cut & Paste is too advanced for their average user base and doesn't want to confuse anyone, so they're just getting rid of it for everyone. / above average FTW!

frigg

@lithivm:

agreed. "You don't know what's best for you, so we will decide for you."

whatever happened to fair use?

Then again, Apple is known for choosing for you.

Parapraxis

They only around this is to have the "shared space" be on an internet server so every time you copy something it would be saved over the network. when you go to past it into another app it would look on the server for you open clip file.

peteo

That totally sucks, but the openclip idea sucked as well becuase it would never work with Safari and email, the two most important apps on the iPhone. Therefore making it worthless.

igneous

What a joke. Anytime someone makes an attempt to make this product less crappy (without breaking any of Apples ridiculous rules) they get pwnt by Apple. Why does anyone give these people their money!?

Bluesk1d

@Joseph:
Thank you.

For everyone bitching about stability, maybe there is a reason for the sandbox. Now the ball is in Apples court to be responsible and provide the stability that we should expect from the tight infrastructure.

Mayor McRib

@mcdj: Apple is taking full responsibility for anything that happens on the phone unlike most other cell phones. The iPhone is growing at Windows 95/98 speed right now and if it does become the major phone in the industry in 5-7 years, I'm sure Apple does not want it to go the way of Windows where you need to spend half of your computers memory and processor making sure that your computer is okay. Since cell phones are fairly decentralized, hackers don't have a platform to create a virus payload to hit 90% of cell phones like they do with Windows. It is frustrating for me (speaking from a developers perspective) but I see why they are doing it. The lack of copy/paste is probably just cuz they haven't figure out a smart/intuitive way to execute it yet. It's obviously possible, but I think they have bigger problems on their hands than copy/paste.

If you're running an Installer.app program, you're trusting that those developers aren't writing programs that are harvesting all your personal information and selling the data off to the highest bidder. The Installer.apps are free and since they are already on your device, it's not difficult to write a phone-home program. Through Apples infrastructure, their hope is to catch software like this to prevent it from destroying everyones phone. If the code isn't signed and your phone is hacked/jailbroken--you're pretty much volunteering yourself for a potential open trojan attack.

Joseph

@MikeSWelch: Thats actually a very good idea, but I still think that copy/paste would be a desired feature even if better regex was included.

Joseph

I DON"T WANT COPY PASTE

Just give me better regular expression clicking.

If a phone number appears in a text, email, or web page, its clickable.
If an email address appears in a text, email, or web page, its clickable.
If an url appears in a text, email, or web page, its clickable.

APPLE, DO THIS FOR ADDRESSES!!!

Also, let me send contacts as vCards, then there is absolutely no use for copy/paste and it's much more elegant.

MikeSWelch

@Joseph: I've read about port scanning of iPhones over WiFi finding SSH vulnerabilities.

@MikeSWelch: I recently had a url in an e-mail that fooled Safari. It had a long string of digits in it and Safari tried to parse a phone number out of it and missed the url.

propertius

It's because they haven't found a way to charge you per copy/paste yet.

GeekyNerdGuy

what is the big deal about copy/paste ive never ran into a situation on the phone were i needed it, hell i hardly do on the computer.

otis123

wtf? are they retarded? ther REALLY don't want us to have copy paste!

ddragos

I don't care for copy/paste or any other programs that morphs you to outer space. All I need right now is for Apple to fix iPhone 3g issues and software crashes. I have mastered the art of RESTORING my phone gazillion times since I got it last month. Sigh!

rjbuddyboi

Apple doesn't like being made to look bad. They have been stating how copy & paste isn't an easy fix to make for as long as there have been iPhones.

Openclip comes along and says- here ya go, have your copy & paste, it made Apple look foolish. Apple wouldn't have it.

This might make Jobs dig in his heels even deeper. Remember how long we had to suffer with single button mice in order to placate his holiness' ego.

barkolounger

I heart Symbian.

Aaron Martin-Colby

They didn't leave out copy and paste because they're failures, Apple left it out as a conscious design decision. They can't have you unwashed hordes ruining their work. I only wish I were wise enough to understand the reasoning behind it, but all my humble and inferior mind might speculate is that the boorish act of copying the work of another and pasting it at one's own whim is an insult to this shrine to originality smelt in the eternal forge at the hands of a genius.

mhlaxp

Apple is gonna bring copy and paste to the iphone and seem like the real hero when no one pays attention that they stopped anyone else's attempts.

gamecrazychris

@mildretard: My bubble, she is burst. Got to admit it does looks the dog's tho.

Bob1967

I love copy/paste as much as the next guy, but I still don't understand why people have been clamoring for it lately as opposed to MMS. Wouldn't more people rather have that instead? Or have we all just given up hope?

rcast1986

This whole sandboxing is the biggest source of data loss for users and their individual apps, and is a very bad idea.

Two different programs now I've lost several weeks of input or saved information because an upgrade to the application overwrites the /Documents folder in the applications directory. Happened with a month's worth of data in a daily food and exercise tracking application, and just today with an update to a gaming app.

I was never able to recover the food daily data, even with Apple backup/restore files intact (they use plists for pete's sake, not the actual database files).

Fortunately, I decided to jailbreak my iPhone last night, and this morning had hand copied (AppleScript in the works) the /Documents folder to my laptop for safekeeping; so when an upgrade to MotionX poker got the dreaded 0xeeeblahblah error on updating, I was able to just reinstall the app and then SSH my database with saved scores and stuff back to the appropriate directory.

Apple, just give us our damn cut and paste! I'm as rabid a fanboi as the next geek, but this is just ridiculous.

distortedloop

@rcast1986: @otis123: Well, I agree about MMS - it should be there, and so should copy/paste. So here's the best reason to have to copy/paste: it's because the damned lack of MMS. If one of the luddites who sends me pics from their phone forget to address it to my email instead of my phone number, I get a stupid SMS message with a random password and login id that I have to try to remember both (I'm old, it's hard to remember LOL) to go see the picture. What jack ass came up with that scheme?

distortedloop

And this is why I will not buy an iPhone; I can't abide Apple's ridiculous, draconian control of the platform.

Android, here I come!

HeartBurnKid, creepy morbid freak

@barkolounger:

1 minute. I hooked up a logitech mouse and moved on.

Camperton

@Aaron Martin-Colby: Anyone with any sense does.

sxr7171

@takashimiike Ultimate: What did you expect? It's Apple. You must use the phone exactly in ways approved by Apple. Sure the phone belongs to you, but kind of. It really belongs to you, Apple, and AT&T - BFF.

sxr7171

I have 3 words for Apple - WHAT THE FUCK?

DaSmith

To all the morons complaining about this: did you not read the full daringfireball article? Relying on the ability to read from other app's directories (a privacy concern and something the sandboxing never should have allowed) was just plain stupid.

t3nken

Hey,

I'm the OpenClip developer and just wanted to say a few things about this. I'll be posting a blog post on openclip.org about this soon.

First off, I unfortunately found out about this about an hour after I was interviewed by Cali. It really didn't change my plans much and here's why:

- The goal is to bring the usefulness of copy/paste to light. Everyone thinks it would be useful on this device, but sometimes being able to actually use it can really make it obvious.
- Let developers experiment with copy/paste both in their UI and in the code. I modeled the API after NSPasteboard, Apple's OS X implementation of copy/paste. If apple would just implement NSPasteboard and nothing else (radar bug: 6158362), apps could get all the functionality that I'm proposing.
- Get some interesting functionality in apps *now* (well in the next few days...).

By coming out with this, I hope to convince Apple that NSPasteboard or a similar API is needed on the iPhone. If that isn't successful and 2.1 comes out and breaks OpenClip, all that will happen is apps lose inter-application copy and paste. Apps will still retain in application copy and paste, which can still be pretty useful.

-Zac

P.S. I have a little problem when people point the the "access" quote. I certainly don't have "access" to your car, but I can definitely see in through your windows. And I've been informed that it used to read "read and write" and was later changed to "access", so that is very confusing. Read and write is probably what apple meant, but why not put that in the legally binding document or be explicit about it in the users guide...

zacwhite