First let me say that the video was nice and clear. It's good that people are tackling this problem, but this solution seems to be inspired by the way that PC or Mac software would handle the problem.

I imagine that Apple will add a system-wide gesture to make Copy/Paste work in a new way. The extension to the magnifying glass is good for selecting text. They'll probably add a two-fingered drag to the menu bar for copy and a two fingered drag from the menu bar for paste.

Part of the delay in adding Copy/Paste is probably due to security issues - they don't want a bug in the application the data is copies from to cause a crash in the application the data is pasted into.

Definitely a great and functional app. Just for fun though, I'd love to know how you were on a wifi network while in Airplane Mode.

Good luck with this app!!

I don't like the method they chose to use for selecting text. It looks like it is difficult to get the start selecting in the right place. Plus it looks like it might select text when all you want to do is place the cursor using the magnifying glass in a specific place.

I think it would be better if when you hold one finger on the screen the magnifying glass comes up like normal. Then you tap a second finger on the screen to tell the program that you want to start selecting text. This method would solve the two problems I mentioned above.

I would like to see text selection done a different way, by implementing double tap to select a single word (similar to desktop software) and also by placing a finger at the start, causing a loupe come up, and then placing a second finger at the end, displaying a second loupe, so you can move those two fingers independently for precise selection. Finally, I really like alex's idea of dragging to the menubar. Apple could use the Menu Bar to support multiple clippings, giving each a little icon that you can drag back out, or press and hold to see a preview of the clipping's contents. That'd be quite great! ^_^

Click & drag selections are a legacy from systems without multitouch/multiple cursors. It doesn't make sense on a multitouch device and seems difficult to use with pointing devices with as low precision as index fingers.

Security concerns also make a lot of sense. A bug in one of the built in apple supplied applications could potentially run arbitrary code as 'root' when a specially formed evil paste was done in to it if they aren't extremely careful. This isn't a big deal on the iPod Touch, but could brick an iPhone's GSM modem if it was done maliciously. I doubt apple is strongly motivated by fear of the clipboard being used to jailbreak as current jailbreaking techniques are extremely effective and at least for current model iPhones and iPod Touches seem impossible to defeat, and don't rely on buffer overflows in the booted software.

I really look forward to seeing system wide clipboard functionality (implemented a lot better than this app). Hopefully we won't need to wait till OS 3.0 for it. :)

why is there captcha?

That looks fantastic - an excellent step in the direction of the Newton Notepad which is still the gold standard for this sort of thing. I do have one request: please please PLEASE do not copy the incredibly lame behavior the iPhone's Notepad app has of sorting notes by last modification time. Sort by note *creation* time. When I go back and review old notes, fixing typos or deleting no-longer-relevant bits here and there, those notes should not percolate to the top of my list thereby randomizing their time ordering.

great app

Like the screenshot video nicely done.