Pastebud brings Copy & Paste to iPhone (But still Not Perfect)

You may have heard of Pastebud already. Pastebud has drawn much attention in the tech community in these few days and been covered by a huge number of presses. For starter, Pastebud is a service that lets you have “Copy & Paste” feature on iPhone.

“Copy & Paste” is one of the highly anticipated features for iPhone. Every iPhone user is looking forward to this feature built-into iPhone. Apple may be working on it but at least for the latest firmware 2.2, this feature is still not available.

While most workaround solutions for Copy & Paste are installed on iPhone, Pastebud takes another innovative approach. You do not need to install any component/application on iPhone. Pastebud simply offers Copy & Paste features by using two bookmarklets – COPY & PASTE, that are clipped inside Safari browser. With these bookmarklets, you can perform Copy & Paste text between Safari and Mail application.

How Pastebud Works

To install the bookmarklet, open Safari on iPhone and point to http://www.pastepud.com. You’ll find a brief information on how to install the COPY & PASTE bookmarklets. But the installation is as straightforward as you may think. A little editing for the bookmarks is required as you follow the instruction.

Once you have the COPY & PASTE bookmark installed, you can fire up any web page in Safari. Open the COPY bookmark to start copying text. To select text, tap and drag your finger across the words or paragraph you want to copy. Then hit COPY button to copy the text.

You’ll have two options for PASTE. Either you can paste to another web page in Safari or paste into Mail application. To paste into mail, hit the top-left button in Pastebud. It brings to Mail application directly with the text copied. To paste into another web page, just hit the PASTE bookmark. That’s it.

Pastebud is a free service. However, for free version, Pastebud appends a footer message to the end of each paste. To hide this footer text, you can upgrade to premium service by paying USD$5.

For more information about Pastebud, you can check its official website and the video.

Pastebud is still not perfect

We have seen a lot of attempts by developers worldwide to implement Copy & Paste into iPhone. For instance, MagicPad, CopierciN and OpenClip framework. And now comes to Pastebud using bookmark approach. However, none of them are perfect, without the backing from Apple.

As an iPhone user, I want to see a system-wide Copy & Paste feature, just like what we have on Windows or Mac. The Copy & Paste feature should not be limited to a selective number of applications. I want to copy text between every application – from Safari to Note, from Mail to Calendar or from Note to Maps, etc…

Dear Apple, when will the Copy & Paste feature be available for iPhone? It’s been nearly one and half year since the first iPhone debuted. I understand you are always working hard to bring us some breathtaking technologies to this little device. We all appreciate it. But please don’t forget this tiny feature. Copy & Paste does save me thousand of hours and I know many of iPhone user like me want to have this feature built-in. Hope you won’t let us down and bring this feature in firmware 2.3.

What do you think about Pastebud? Are you expecting Copy & Paste in the next version of firmware? Leave your comment and let us know your thought.

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