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iPhone Copy & Paste hiding right under our noses

By: , IntoMobile
Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 2:22 PM

While the iPhone enthusiasts throughout the blogosphere were busy lamenting Apple’s failure to deliver a working, system-wide copy-and-paste feature in the iPhone 2.0 OS, it seems Apple was busy building their copy/paste framework in to new iPhone 2.1 OS and iPhone 2.1 SDK.

Apple just last night released their newest iPhone OS revision, iPhone 2.1 OS, to iPhone developers. The seed of the new iPhone firmware was accompanied by the iPhone 2.1 SDK – and that’s where the fun begins.

In a discovery that has again renewed our hope for true cut-n-paste functionality on our iPhone, an iPhone developer found references to cut/paste features in iPhone 2.1 SDK frameworks. Specifically, the references were found in the “Localizable.strings” file located in the “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit.framework.”

Apple iPhone SDK shows cut and paste functionality

Interestingly, the cut/paste references in the iPhone framework were found alongside references to Spotlight search, text-to-speech, file uploads, and Finder. It’s not yet clear if Apple intentionally built the framework to support the much-needed cut-and-paste functionality, or if the references in the iPhone code were just carried over from Apple’s desktop Webkit implementation.

Is Apple working to push out cut/paste functionality in the near future? Was Greg Joswiak misleading when he announced that turn-by-turn GPS navigation was a higher priority than cut-n-paste? Why can’t both features be high priorities for Apple? We’re rooting for Apple to get busy in releasing both enhanced GPS features as well as cut/paste in the next iPhone OS iteration.

[Via: TUAW]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Ruggy

    I accidentally caused my iPhone to highlight some text and copy it. I don't know how I did it – some sequence of tapping and dragging, and it first highlighted some text then duplicated the text when I tapped again. I am convinced that copy/paste is already implemented. I am running the 2.2 firmware.

  • Jose Luis Gouveia

    kind a weird han ?