Since the iPhone relies on capacitance rather than pressure, covering one’s fingers when using it would be rather unproductive.

Except on iPhone, tap-and-drag is reserved for moving the text cursor around. So yeah, you could have this implementation of clipboard controls, but without the ability to, you know… place the cursor where you want to begin with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lNpnbDHQ9Q

1. Inter-application communication
2. User interface.

The Daring Fireball essay doesn’t say that sandboxing prevents copy/paste between applications. It says that sandboxing prevents the way OpenClip wants to do it from working. It suggests that developers can’t do it themselves, Apple will have to get involved.

The video addresses the second problem. I suspect that user interface is a bigger reason why the iPhone OS doesn’t yet have copy/paste. It’s not like Apple doesn’t know how to do the behind the scenes nuts-n-bolts of copy/paste.

Using the Newton interface breaks because the Newton gesture to select is the iPhone OS gesture to move the cursor. Usually, that shuts down the conversation quite nicely.

However, what’s wrong with the rest of the interface? I like the idea of copying or cutting by dragging the selection off to the edge of the screen. That seems much easier (and less modal) than having to pop up a menu or only being able to copy or paste when the keyboard is on screen.

Yes, Apple will need a different select gesture. However, the Newton gestures to do the actual cutting, copying, or pasting will still work. I hope Apple will consider those.

I’m not sure the way the Newton represent clips of text will work on iPhone’s physically smaller screen. The clip may be too small to tap and drag. However, having something physical on screen to paste solves the “how do you initiate a paste” problem that all the other copy/paste proposals have run into.

Since all good things were invented by Jobs

A popular but wrong notion. Steve Jobs is a manager and businessman, I don’t think he’s invented a thing in his life. Many of Apple’s best ideas were invented by Woz.

Sure it would be fine for a large screen (i.e. Microsoft Surface) but on something that fits in your pocket? Give me a break.

And no, I don’t have anything more useful to contribute, sorry!

..except that milions of people actually like the iPhone sized touch screen.

Except, of course, that you can’t dial an iPhone while wearing gloves – or even with a stylus. And that sound you hear in the background is even more Palm users laughing their asses off, while wearing gloves and dialing phone numbers on the new Centros that they got after sending back their iPhones.

The iPhone — and what people are clamoring to make it do — is like the ultimate “we told you so” to those of us who liked using the Newton and were heartbroken when Jobs came back and killed it. Sure, he was trying to get a capsising boat to shore, but the bajillions of iPhone sales seem to contradict his insistence that “nobody wants a scribble-pad”.