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.”
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]