How about piped data instead of copy and paste?

I keep thinking that the reason there isn't copy and paste functionality on the iPhone yet is that Apple isn't going to do a traditional copy and paste thing on the iPhone. Maybe Apple is working on a replacement concept for traditional copy and paste that is more suited to a phone environment. The more I think about that, the more I think that something like Unix command line pipes might be suitable.

Here's the idea. You would be able to select items or text in one application. Say, you enter a selection mode where the edges of the screen pulse or do something to indicate that it's not normal user mode. You select things by touching and dragging while in that mode. Once you're done, you double-tap and the iPhone pulls up a list of applications that can accept what you have selected.

At that point, you tap the application and it "pipes" the selected items to that application by opening the application and presenting you with whatever the application does (or an intermediate dialog for situations where the app can interpret or use the piped data in several different ways.) For example, an email program would pull up your selection as the contents of a new email. Notes would present you with a a dialog to create a new note or append to an existing one. Calendar would offer to create a new calendar entry. Safari would pipe the data into whatever form element is selected in its frontmost page.

Obviously developers would have to rewrite their apps to deal with piped data, but that would give some applications a fair amount of flexibility and still keep the UI clean and easy to understand for the user.

So, good idea or bad?

 

Not really. I've had an iPhone for 4 months now and I've literally only needed copy and paste once. Maybe I'm not typical. Maybe everyone else needs copy and paste badly but I've found that my usage doesn't really require it. For all the carping about it, I've found it to be pretty much a non-issue. I certainly wouldn't be dumb enough to jailbreak my phone for such a seldom used feature.

And in response to some other posts here, my piped data concept comes from the fact such an approach is already there in the iPhone. You can click the "email this photo" link in photos and it pipes the image over to the email program. You click a phone number on a web page and Safari hands it over to the phone. There are other examples. In some ways, I prefer that kind of interapplication movement of data and it seems simpler and more streamlined for use on a limited platform like a mobile phone than copy and paste. If any company out there can figure out how to make that approach trump the traditional copy and paste approach, I think it would be Apple.

And as far as them trying to figure out the proper gesture, I don't buy it. It's Apple we're talking about. If copy and paste were going to be part of the iPhone it would have been there from the start and the proper UI/gestures would have been worked out. The fact that so many third parties can figure out how to implement it and Apple hasn't yet tells me that copy and paste as we know it just isn't in the cards.