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OpenClip.org Offers Copy and Paste for iPhone Across Apps

Tuesday August 19, 2008 10:01 pm PDT by Arnold Kim
Many will remember Proximi's MagicPad [App Store] iPhone application which was the first to offer a 3rd party notepad application for the iPhone with copy and paste functionality. Of course, due to the constraints of the iPhone SDK, Promixi was only able to provide copy and paste functionality within their own application.

Promixi, however, took it a step further and proposed an interface for system-wide copy and paste on the iPhone. While Apple has acknowledged that iPhone copy and paste is in their plans, it has simply not been a high enough priority for them.

Student developer Zac White has since taken matters in his own hands and founded a non-profit, open source, community project called OpenClip which is offering iPhone developers a free Copy and Paste framework that will add this functionality to their applications. This will allow users to copy and paste data between supported applications.

OpenClip accomplishes this feat while still following the rules of Apple's SDK. iPhone applications are allowed to read from other application's files but only write to their own. By creating a standard location for each application's "clipboard", applications can "copy" by simply saving data locally and "paste" by pulling the most recently saved data across all applications.

A demonstration of the OpenClip is shown in GeekBrief.tv video with early versions of Twittelator [App Store], WordPress [App Store], and MagicPad [App Store].


These same developers have OpenClip-supported versions coming soon with others pledging support. Developers and users can find more information at OpenClip.org.

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