Copy / paste app for iPhone is meaningless, has no bearing on anything

What's the sound of a tree falling when no one's around to hear it? What's the sound of one hand clapping? And perhaps most importantly, what's the purpose of a clipboard when only one app can use it? Development shop Proximi is making a pretty big stink about its MagicPad app for the iPhone, touting its homegrown copy / paste functionality as part of a rich text-editing package to help shore up the handset's weak sauce (read: non-existent) office app suite. That's all well and good -- the app looks well-executed and provides a core function that should've been present across the entire iPhone to start -- but without buy-in from Apple, the clipboard's stuck in the MagicPad sandbox. Cool? Yes. Should Apple be paying attention? Yes. Useful? At this point, barely.

[Via MacRumors]

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 8:39AM]

Ah, I was just waiting for this type of post. I love it how you go on a big rant about how MagicPad doesn't bring copy/paste to the entire iPhone. But can you help me out with something...

Can you tell me where the developers EVER said that would be the case?

Oh, that's right. They didn't.

It was the stupid idiotic media as usual that caught wind of the fact that this application has its own copy & paste functionality built-in and tried to drum that up with a tie-in to native copy & paste.

All these developers ever said that they've found a good way to implement copy & paste functionality while they were writing their application and it is an implementation that maybe Apple should consider bringing to the masses natively.

It seems to me like Proximi has achieved EVERYTHING they set out to do and the only people that look like idiots are the sites that misrepresented or misunderstood what that was.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 9:32AM]

Heyyyyyyy......is this the CEO of Proximi?????

[Chris Posted Jul 30th 2008 9:40AM]

Neil - you completely misunderstand the purpose of our post. MagicPad's copy/paste functionality has been overhyped, overplayed, and over-loved by the internets from day one, and we're simply trying to realign those expectations.

You'll notice that I call the app cool. It is, really -- well designed and well executed, and much love goes out to Proximi for its hard work. But a big part of our job is to keep the hype in check, and this is a case where we really felt the need to remind everyone exactly what MagicPad is.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 11:35AM]

I'm sure Apple has already implemented a universal copy/paste in their next firmware; I feel pretty bad for Proximi spending a bunch of time on it when it's right up ahead on the road. Well, at least they'll make some money from it for the time being, huh?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 12:45PM]

I agree. Proximi isn't achieving anything here in terms of "convincing Apple that it's possible". Apple CHOSE not to implement this yet. Does anyone REALLY believe they haven't figured out HOW to do it? C'mon, their programmers developed a landmark phone UI that no one else has even come close to duplicating. Of course they could add copy/paste. They chose not to. Why, because they are Apple, and they do that sort of thing. They hand out the crack in small increments so we keep salivating for more.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 12:54PM]

They didn't implement it in firmware for all of iPhone 1.0. Why for 2.0 immediately?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 30th 2008 12:07PM]

At least its something. Maybe Apple will buy that company out and implement a clipboard type app across all iPhone apps.

Then again that would require something to be running in the background, taking up memory.....welcome to Windows!!!