Copy and paste for the iPhone, seriously

Though we’ve seen some entertaining descriptions and demonstrations of how it could work, no coder has managed to fulfill perhaps the most requested gap on the iPhone, Copy and Paste functionality — until now. Preston Monroe has developed a bookmarklet that delivers the ability to copy and paste within Safari on the iPhone with surprisingly few limitations.

Dubbed “iCopy,” this bookmarklet can copy paragraphs of text and URLs from Safari and paste the information back into Safari or into email messages. It works like this:

• Install iCopy. There are two options for doing this. You can either navigate to: http://www.biocow.com/iCopy/ on your iPhone and follow the instructions, or drag this link: Copy/Paste to your bookmarks bar in Safari (under Mac OS X or Windows) then sync your bookmarks to your iPhone via Safari.
• Navigate to a page from which you’d like to copy text or the page’s URL.
• Access the iCopy bookmark in Safari (should be named Copy/Paste). This will display a JavaScript-generated dialog box of sorts with the copy and paste options.
• Tap Copy.
• Select the copy option you’d like. If you select “Email text” (by far the most useful and nifty function), you’ll get a message that says “Ready to Copy.” Select the paragraph you want to copy, and instantly a new email message is created with the text in the body. If you select a different copy option (if, for instance, you’d like to copy text or a URL from one page into a form) you must access the Copy/Paste bookmark again then select paste where you’d like to place the information.

iCopy can be added to a slew of other innovative usages of the bookmarklet model. Bookmarklets have been used for password auto-filling, viewing Safari-embedded YouTube content, performing a “Find on Page,” and converting Web pages into locally stored code.

The author offers this disclaimer about iCopy’s usage: “The text you paste is added to the URL and sent across the internet. This is VERY UNSECURE so be sure not to copy and paste important private information.”

Feedback? info@iphoneatlas.com.