Posts Tagged ‘jailbreak’

Trying Out Copy-Paste On The iPhone

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Clippy has been mentioned in popular sites now that I just had to try it out. It is currently in beta, only version 0.9 now, so it may not be properly stable. It adds two additional buttons to the virtual keyboard in the “numbers” section. You highlight the text to be copied by dragging your finger along the text, select “copy” (the copied text will be displayed beside the additional buttons), then locate the place where you would like to copy it to. It could be in another application, of course (except Safari Mobile as reported by lifehacker).

clippy

This gif image is created by yours truly using glickr.

I find that it is a very seamless implementation. I really like it. However, the highlighting seems to be permanently on for me. If I need to correct the middle part of a word (yes, I do make mistakes despite the excellent spell check), I would have to drag my finger to place the cursor there. Now, it automatically highlights the dragged portion, from where the cursor was to the destination. I am not sure if this is an intended design or a bug, so I have sent an email to the author of the app. According to him, this is an intended design.

Another minor annoyance I have with this is that in the SMS app, if you switch to the number mode in the keyboard, the placeholder where you write your message will be replaced by the copy and paste buttons. Not a super high priority flaw, but still an annoyance nonetheless.

For those of you with jailbroken iPhones, this is a worthy addition to your list of jailbroken apps. Right up there with SSH, PdaNet and BossPrefs. Install it via the iSpazio source in Cydia now!

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iPhone 2.2 Update: Great! But Jailbreaking Still Required…

Monday, November 24th, 2008

The iPhone had its 2.2 update on Thursday (if I’m not wrong). As usual, I would let the suckers early adopters try it out first. Then I will read all their whines and complains on the web before deciding if I should jump the gun.

However, as soon as I saw the new features, I began to get the itch. Was it the improved Google Maps? Nah, GMaps is good, but not too useful in Singapore. Was it the ability to directly download audio and video podcasts over the air? Hmm, I have yet to subscribe to any podcasts these days. Probably because I’m too hooked to Google Reader to try. Was it the supposedly improved stability and performance of Safari Mobile? Maybe! I’m an on-the-go Google Reader freak, and its crashes was even causing me to contemplate switching to another mobile phone.

All of these were compelling reasons, but the most compelling one for me is this:

The ability to turn off auto-correct! Woohoo! :D

I’m a simple man who prefers simple pleasures. It’s these little niggly things that gets on my nerves. Such a simple feature to implement, but why oh why does it take Apple so long to put in such a simple feature? Cut/Copy-&-Paste is another noteworthy feature, but will Apple allow a shared clipboard across all apps? Hard to say, but in my opinion, probably not in the near future. Probably in iPhone 3G part deux maybe.

So does this mean the no more jailbreaking? Of course not! There are quite a few compelling reasons to continue jailbreaking:

Apple will always try to lock you (as with all companies) so that they can retain control and milk you for all its worth! Lucky for us, there’s these guys!

Hopefully, the tweaks to Safari Mobile fixes the multitude of crashes I’ve experienced, the feeling will be like moving from Windows 98 to Windows XP! Let’s see how many I crashes I will get this week.

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