iPhone Copy and Paste Between Applications Is Here, But Not from Apple

At last, iPhone copy and paste between applications is here. However, it doesn’t come from Apple, but from MagicPad developer Zac White. Cali Lewis, the ever-smiling presenter at GeekBrief, got the scoop on his new OpenClip open-source framework, which will enable any developer to implement copy and paste between applications without violating Apple’s developer agreement.

OpenClip, which is non-profit and fully open source, doesn’t use any background processing. Applications that use the framework will be able to copy any kind of information into a common pasteboard, as well as read from it. The framework is smart too: If you copy styled text or HTML text, it will respect the format you used, but only if the application in which you are pasting supports it. In Cali’s example, the HTML snippet in the pasteboard gets copied with full HTML support to the WordPress application, but only as normal, clean text with no formatting into MagicPad.

Right now, only a few applications are implementing the open standard. We can only hope that it takes the iPhone app world by storm. Either that or Apple wakes up already and smells the coffee. This implementation makes sense, and you already use the behaviour for other things, like saving images from Safari to photo album. Like Cali says, it may not be a priority for them, but it is for millions out there. [GeekBrief- Thanks Rick!]