MagicPad: iPhone Copy / Paste & More (Video)
July 28, 2008
In a follow-up to the story we broke last week, Apple iPhone Apps has new information about an app that will, amongst other things, finally bring copy & paste functionality to the iPhone.
MagicPad is a rich-text editor that was recently submitted to Apple for verification and inclusion into the App Store. A rich text-editor, the first of its kind for the iPhone, MagicPad allows users to create text documents in which they can change fonts, text sizes, colors, and even add bold, italic, underline, and strike-through effects to their text. After creating their customized memos, users can also email the rich-text notes to themselves or friends.
And even bigger news? MagicPad supports copy, cut and paste -- a very welcome addition for iPhone users. Apple's decision not to include the basic editing feature has prompted nearly endless discussion, some going so far as to create an online petition, turning a seemingly trivial issue into a controversial one.
The company behind MagicPad is a newcomer to the development scene, Proximi, Inc.. Phil Larson, lead developer at Proximi, gave us some insight as to the company's motivations behind the project: solve the thorny problem of implementing copy/paste system-wide on the iPhone.
While MagicPad only supports such functionality within its own application, the company sought to create a working case-study, both elegant and versatile, that would work across the entire iPhone platform. Due to limitations within the iPhone's SDK, MagicPad's rich-text abilities do not transfer between applications, but the company still comprehensively tested their solution for usability against other apps. Pulling out all the stops, the folks at MagicPad have even created a series of videos to demonstrate how how their version of copy & paste would operate with the iPhone's preloaded native apps. The demos should soon be available to the public on the MagicPad site.
MagicPad is definitely a step in the right direction, and that right direction is getting copy & paste onto the iPhone. Proximi hopes the public will like their solution and they believe if many people download this application, it might give Apple the impetus it needs to finally make copying and pasting on the iPhone a reality. Again, the application is not available in the App Store yet, and we’ll keep you posted on when it goes live.