Clippy works by adding copy and paste buttons to the iPhone’s keyboard which can be activated on any editable text (emails and SMS). To begin copying, you click “copy.” Then you highlight the text. Then you click “copy” again.

Alright, copying is done.

To paste, you just click “paste.”

The solution is obviously not super quick, but it’s a lot better than using a piece of paper to write down an address before entering it incorrectly into Google Maps. [Clippy via TUAW]

We were excited about Pastebud, but reports are showing that the full text of the copied emails, which are sent to an online clipboard, are being sent out to the wrong users. Harry McCracken at Technologizer noticed that he was receiving totally unknown emails from Pastebud, and many had names and other personal information. Further, none of the text he was hoping to copy came back to him, which means some stranger almost certainly had access to his emails.

Jed Schmidt, the creator of Pastebud, figured out the problem pretty quickly: the directions weren’t clear enough, so users had been sending their text to be copied to the wrong email address, leading to a sort of communal pool of emails that got sent out randomly. It should be fixed now, but it’s just one more lesson to read the warning carefully: Pastebud is not the tool to use if you’ve got top-secret blueprints or a mistress holed up in an apartment somewhere. [Technologizer]

As you saw in the demo video, Pastebud works via two Javascript bookmarklets that you save to your Safari browser (and edit slightly). The COPY bookmark translates whatever page you’re currently looking at into a text-only version, where you can highlight your desired text. This can then be moved directly to an email, or saved to your virtual clipboard (stored on Pastebud’s servers, but anonymously and only for five minutes, they claim).

Pasting text back into another web form via the PASTE bookmarklet is easy–after tapping it, a green box labelled PASTE HERE is overlaid onto any open form field. Tapping that drops in your clipboard’s contents, preserving any HTML that was there if the form supports it.

But, of course, there are some drawbacks. While pasting to and from different Safari windows and emails covers a lot of one’s copying and pasting needs, it’s not anywhere close to the convenience a system-wide solution would bring. You still can’t paste the URL to the cute kitten photo you’re looking at onto your Wall via the Facebook app, for instance. For things like this, being able to access Safari’s URL bar would be nice, since natively, you can only export your current URL via Mail.

Also, the free version inserts a small one-line ad for Pastebud; $US5 turns this off, and also eliminates the popup that appears whenever you paste. $US5 isn’t too bad though, for something that’s ultimately pretty convenient. If you’re betting on Apple’s year-plus delay on coming up with a copy and paste solution carrying on, it’s not a bad investment. Check out Lifehacker as well for more impressions: [Pastebud, Lifehacker]

Unlike other approaches, it works with the two apps that matter most, Mail and Safari, and gets around Apple’s onerous App Store terms through a clever combination of javascript bookmarks and web services.

In fact, it doesn’t require anything to be installed, so it avoids the App Store altogether. As you can see in the video, Pastebud–as the service is called–works using two bookmarks in Safari. One prepares and loads the page you are viewing, ready to select text at the touch of a finger. From there, you can copy any text you want and create a new mail message with that text in it. In addition to that, you will be able to copy and paste in the text field of a different web page.

While this is not full copy and paste capabilities, I, for one, welcome the ability do exactly this, which is basically what I want to do 95% of the time. According to Jed Schmidt, creator of Pastebud, they have been testing it for about a week and they are now “putting the finishing touches on the web site before launch”.

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