Magic Pad brings copy and paste to the iPhone… sort of
Brian Radmin and the gang over at Proximi have created the first Rich Text Editor for the iPhone, and it looks to give us our first real glimpse at how “copy and paste” functionality will likely work on the iPhone.
MagicPad is an iPhone app (currently awaiting iTunes’ approval) that allows you much of the textual functionality of Apple’s Mail Program (the version on the Mac, not on the iPhone). You can create and save drafts of text, send that text as an e-mail, but what’s really nice about MagicPad is that you can apply different fonts, styles, and colors to text, as well as copy and paste text within notes. Unfortunately the copy/paste functionality is not system-wide, but it appears to be well implemented within the app itself, so hopefully Apple’s rumored forthcoming solution will work similarly.
The video demo below shows MagicPad in action.
First Look – MagicPad from Apple iPhone Apps on Vimeo.
Why don’t they use the copy/paste paradigm from the Newton? You can stick things to edges of the screen and they stay there until you pull them off, even when when you change applications.
MagicPad’s solution to copy/paste looks nice, but I doubt it’s how Apple will (eventually) implement it since it requires an ever-present menu bar.
They’ve done a nice job with this. I think that that Apple will probably implement copy/paste it in a similar fashion, using the magnifying glass. An option to copy entire words at a time would be useful and make selection a little easier. I could see Apple implementing the keyboard toolbar for rich text-based applications and without the toolbar for others. Now, all we need is to be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard with the iphone. Apple, ARE YOU LISTENING?
What’s with the captcha when you send an email?
How did he send an email with the iPhone in airplane mode?
@ jeffa: in 2.0 u can switch to airplane but you’re still able to turn on wi-fi,,,,
just wanted to say, the guy who’s presenting the app is an idiot. he made my ears bleed and he couls at least have practiced a bit typing and actually using the iphone before doing a review.
nice app anyway. bu i still don’t believe apple will implement it like that. it just doesn’t look elegant enough and it kind of just doesn’t make sense compared to the input interafce the iphone/ touch has. but the thing with the edges from newton (even if i’m too young to have ever seen one in use) sounds mutch more like apple.
btw, has anoyone figured out how to send a contact as a text to another person (vcar from nokia ringing a bell…???) ?
cheers
Magic Pad has become a front page app on my iPhone. With a couple of bug fixes it would almost be a perfect app.
The first bug I want to see fixed is the caps lock function. You double tap the shift key and it turns blue as if it were locked but reverts to lower case after the first letter typed.
The second bug is that it does not handle international keyboards properly.