Copy and Paste on the iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

I literally received about 10 emails and more than enough comments about this one already, and the blog hasn’t even been up 24 hours yet.

There are several people that sent this in, and while I won’t name them all, I think them all to be correct. Copy and Paste on the iPhone. I received an awesome email today, a very long email, and funny enough, the email was written on an iPhone. So without further ado, I am going to post it here for all to see.

“There are currently 3 major ways to copy text on a computer: menu bar, keyboard shortcut, and the right click. The first two options are largely unfeasible on the iPhone: the menu bar because it takes up too much screen space to be practical, and the keyboard because it doesn't exist.  So the only two options are to find a right click analogy on the iPhone or go with something entirely new. The first option is better because 1) it is easier for users to understand as it corresponds to something they already know, and 2) because it is easier on apple since they already know how to implement it.

The right click I have in mind is the tap and hold. This gesture is basically unused right now on the iPhone, which is a shame because it is so basic. Tap and hold only does one thing currently: if you tap and hold on a link or picture in safari, a popup window appears with that link's info. In iPhone 2.0, using this gesture on a picture will bring up a menu of actions, one of which is download... Basically exactly what a right click would do. So apple seems to understand that the tap and hold has to become the new right click. All they need to do now is to make it universal, by which I mean that tap and holding pretty much anything will cause a context sensitive menu to pop up.

Since this is supposed to be about copying text I will limit my analysis to what should happen when you tap and hold over text.  First off the menu pops up on the bottom half of the screen, and the top half centers on the place tapped. If it is zoomed out, the text zooms in to become readable. The first, and for our purposes the only, item in the menu is HIGHLIGHT. When this option is selected, the menu screen goes away, and the word closest to where you touched becomes highlighted blue, with two transparent and pulsating semicircle icons flanking the word. The straight line of each semicircle is the text boundary for the highlighted region. Each semicircle is draggable. When you drag one of them, the loop comes up for precise placement. When you have highlighted exactly what you want, tap on the highlighted region to open the clipboard menu, copy being the first option, or double tap on it to automatically copy and deselect the text. To deselect without copying, either select CANCEL in the clipboard menu, or double tap anywhere outside the highlighted region. I feel a double tap is necessary because a single tap would cause too many accidental deselections.

At this point you probably have two questions. 1) okay... So now how do I paste? And 2) wait a minute, in editable text the tap and hold gesture brings up the loop, so how do I copy editable text? Both fine questions with a very similar answer: the keyboard/menu bar. In any editable text field the keyboard is accessible, so whenever you want to paste anywhere or copy from editable text, you have access to the keyboard. You may have also noticed that in some keyboards there is a dark grey menu bar right above it, usually with PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons in it. Well, why not make that menu bar persistent, and allow clipboard functions to be accessible from it? I'm thinking 5 persistent keyboard menu bar icons. From left to right: menu, highlight, copy, paste, done. Menu is basically the command modifier key. Tapping it turns the entire keyboard into app specific actions: print, font, indentation, basically stuff that wasn't important enough to put into the menu bar.  Tapping the highlight icon creates the double semicircle highlight thing around your text curser. Tapping copy copies highlighted text. Tapping paste will paste the last copied text starting at where the text curser is, and tapping done will make the keyboard disappear.

That's the basics of it. There are a few extra things to be taken into consideration, but nothing a bit of product testing can't solve. My approach allows you to copy text wherever there is text. Everything from album names in iTunes to the 10:35 PM in your menu bar is fair game to my approach. And most importantly, my approach does so in a way that is super easy to understand, using simple gestures and unburied menu options that even a novice user will eventually stumble upon.”

Thank you Max for writing it down like that.

Thanks Apple!

Dear Cupertino Readers