I must admit I really like the way they do it: they do not rush, don't push half baked solutions. It either works or it is not there. Look at the copy and paste: it was the laughing point, it took some time and now it is the best implementation there.
Even more so with iPhone OS 4: multitasking, folders, unified inbox — looks like they just focused on what's important.
Anyway, naysayers will always have Flash to cry about.
Have you ever tried it on an Android? I'll admit the popup coming up all the time was annoying at first. But once I saw the alternative -- which was unusable as far as I'm concerned -- I didn't mind it as much.
I just looked up how to do this, as I couldn't figure it out. Slide open the keyboard, hold the shift key and drag your finger across the text you want to copy. I just tested it on my Droid and it works. Not sure about other Android phones..
Agreed. Android copy and paste only works in 1 out of 10 text fields I've tried it on. Sometimes UI elements give a long-press option to copy. Seriously, copying an address from a text message to google maps should NOT be hard.
It doesn't work in yammer, market, contacts, google voice, or facebook. Google voice at least lets you copy the whole message, but then you have to paste and edit.
Copy and paste works great on my blackberry. Which btw, I switched to after 3 years with the iPhone (first generation and 3G) where I hated copy and paste for the reason stated above (shows up when I don't want it to).
Also, I now love my blackberry much more than I ever did the iPhone. Apps I use are available (maps, yelp, foursquare, pandora), and the multitasking and the advanced features of the OS just keep surprising me. I can use my blackberry to connect to a VPN (it's built in). Coming from the iPhone, I feel like my handcuffs have just been taken off and I'm now free to use my phone the way I want to.
Really? I had the exact opposite experience - constant unwanted cut and paste dialogs on Safari/iPhone, none at all (but there when I wanted it) on Android.
Huh? The iPhone uses long taps or double taps for initiating cut/copy/paste. Long taps work everywhere, double taps work only where there’s no zoom function. That’s a pretty clearly defined set of gestures, how would you be able to bring up the dialog accidentally? Note that as soon as you initiate scrolling and then keep your finger on the screen, you can keep it perfectly still as long as you want or continue scrolling anytime you want. The cut/copy/paste dialog will not show up. There is no reason why that dialog should show up when scrolling.
The only way to bring up that dialog accidentally is to tap on the screen, keep your finger still for more than one second and then try to start scrolling. Seems odd for anybody to try doing that.
Perhaps they've improved things since I left iPhone. But I distinctly remember unwanted, aggressive copy / paste dialogs popping up when I wanted to do move around the page.
> Now we weren't the first to this party, but we're gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste.
I'm not sure if I'm more amazed at how something as inane as this basic operation is touted as a huge feature differentiator, or that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar a year computing company, who's been in the business literally from the start, talks about it with breathless urgency like it's the second coming.
Copy/cut and paste is not a major feature, it should be buried among a list of minor enhancements. It's like the equivalent and releasing a new keyboard with a shift key on either side!
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to implement proper copy/paste on a touchscreen device with no keyboard. I must say that I find Apple's implementation very intuitive and easy to use.
Yes, I am calling it a basic feature. Like tires on a car. Every car has them, but rubber and tires are actually pretty complex things.
No, I'm not saying that it doesn't have certain considerations necessary to make it work well. We can't even get proper clipboard support in Ubuntu these days. So I'm not saying it's really that simple.
Yes, I am saying it's not a big feature. Again, it's like VW coming out with a new Jetta, and one of the specs they touted was "Now with tires!!!"
I think a slightly better comparison is if most other car makers had really lousy automatic transmissions that used 30% of the fuel, and VW waited to announce a car with an automatic transmission until they had one that worked really, really well and was just as efficient as a manual transmission.
You're right, it's exactly equivalent to releasing a keyboard with shift on either side in a world where keyboards don't yet exist. Multitouch is a different world.
1. It's unlikely that anybody has found an optimal cut+paste system for multi-touch devices.
2. The broader range of imaginable ways of implementing cut+paste means that the first solutions to market are relatively unlikely to be considered "good" once the various options have been more fully explored.
3. The large number of ways to implement cut+paste means that there will almost certainly be a significant difference in the quality/usability of different solutions. These disparities mean that the mere presence or absence of a cut+paste solution is not enough to judge whether a product does a good job of fulfilling the need for cut+paste. Simply asking whether a product has a cut+paste system is not helpful for comparing multitouch devices, because not all methods are equal, and some may be virtually unusable.
I think this update is the complete opposite of that trend - Apple is trying to do a ton of new things all at once (ads, game center, multitasking, etc.), almost too much in my opinion.
Apple is looking to establish and to extend their beachheads in both the smartphone and tablet spaces, and this is how you do that. You invest design and development and debug and test. Big-time.
Being a response of marketing and features for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and the HP Slate announcements, this looks quite potent.
And interestingly, this approach looks quite reminiscent of how Microsoft slid in a new (Windows) computing platform from up underneath its competitors way back in the 1990s, too.
Right, those features totally never occurred to them before Palm and Google did them. Multitasking? Ads? WALLPAPERS! Where DO they come up with these amazing ideas?
Are we doing feature based checklists now, or comparing good implementations? Multitasking on a small device is largely a UI problem, and it sounds like Apple solved it almost like Palm did. You don't think they do research on what's out there, see how other people have solved problems, and adapt those solutions to what they're trying to do?
I suspect Apple had a roadmap for all of these long before WebOS or Android came out. Could the final form have been influenced by those? Unknowable from outside. I'm not sure in what way you think this looks like Palm's solution.
Apple is probably the market leader in smart phones in the US. But Nokia, as far as I know, is still the market leader in mobile phones, and have a good share of the smart phone market in other places, like Europe, that have been doing more with mobile phones longer than in the US.
