Some thoughts on copy and paste Thursday, October 9th, 2008
The lack of copy and paste has been a pretty hot topic since, well, the iPhone was released. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s as desperately needed as some would have you believe, but it would be a nice addition.
After some thought on the topic, I’ve made a quick video to demonstrate some (hopefully) constructive interface ideas on the way it could be implemented. I know a few others have had a stab at this already—what I’m proposing builds on those concepts with the aim of taking things a little closer to a final solution.
There’s a few main reasons a user highlights text: to cut, copy, paste, delete, replace, or manipulate a selection. These are all achieved easily using this method.
Copy. Once text has been selected, it’s automatically copied, so there’s no need for a specific copy action. The iPhone and other touch devices have taught us that no UI can often be better than cluttering the screen with buttons.
Cut. On a computer, “cutting” is two things, copy and delete. As the text has already been copied, all you need to do to cut is press backspace after making a selection.
Delete. After a selection has been made, press backspace.
Replace. After a selection has been made, type the replacement text.
Paste. A paste button would be added to the keyboard, allowing access to it from anywhere text can be input.
Manipulate. With a selection made, any application could have it’s own, specific manipulation actions.
Copy and paste workflow
- Tap-and-drag to the start of the selection, keep holding
- While holding the first finger down, tap anywhere on the screen with a second finger
- Drag to the end of the selection with the first finger
Word and line selections
If we’re using a second finger tap to signify “I want to make a selection and copy”, why not use a double tap for word-constrained and triple tap for line-constrained selections, just like a computer?
A special case for URLs in MobileSafari
URLs are frequently copied and pasted on a computer, so they probably deserve first class treatment in MobileSafari (and maybe other apps too). Since tap-and-hold isn’t used for anything useful in the current firmware, why not assign it to copying a URL?
Even if something was assigned to tap-and-hold for URLs in MobileSafari, it could copy the URL as well. Doing so would spam the clipboard, but that’s not such a big deal if there’s a clipboard history.
So the workflow for copying a URL from MobileSafari into Mail would be:
- Tap-and-hold the URL in MobileSafari
- Press home
- Tap the Mail icon to launch Mail
- Tap the new message icon
- Tap in the message body to put it in focus
- Tap “.?123″
- Tap the clipboard icon
- Tap the desired clipboard item to paste it in
I hope everyone likes this method and it sparks further discussion and development.
Thanks in advance. Liadan.
Bette.
Juian
October 14, 2008, 3:57 pm
I like the idea of the second finger tap, though the notion of holding multiple pastes in memory would more likely be the exception, not the rule. The simple luxury of being able to extract a phone number from an SMS thread would be bliss on its own. Why not simply retain the second finger tap for paste? No additional buttons required, no need to remember which key does what - just select the insertion point, hold and second tap. Easy.