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?
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?