Copy & Paste and Qik

I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone again. I originally did this pre app store launch in order to get some really interesting 3rd party apps on my iPhone. When the app store was launched I didn't feel the need to have my phone Jailbroken as I was pretty happy with all that was/is available via the app store. But there are 2 apps that I have been reading about that made me want to jailbreak again. 

The first was "Clippy" an app that adds copy and paste functionality to the ".?123" menu on the virtual keyboard. So far the couple of times I used it, it works pretty good. The only annoying thing is that it obscures the area where you are typing slightly but this is a minor annoyance. The second app is the Qik app which allows you to broadcast a live video stream. Below is the quick test video I did yesterday (excuse my messy apartment):

Qik also allows you to send out a message via twitter that you are broadcasting live and so your Twitter followers can go to Qik and see what you are doing. This is a pretty cool feature that would get more people engaged. During my test it didn't seem that my audio was working but as you can see/hear in the video above it seems to be OK. The second test video was at my computer shooting my live feed giving the window within window etc. effect.

Friday I am going to go to the Queens Museum to check out an exhibit on a full model of NYC and I will broadcast via Qik. If you care to check it out I guess the best way to know when it will be live would be to subscribe to my twitter feed.

Copy/Paste for the iPhone

The biggest missing functionality of the iPhone is the ability to copy and paste. From day one this was a glaring omission. The video below was created as a proof of concept of how copy and paste could work but unfortunately Apple has not responded:

Pastebud has been trying to create copy/paste in a unique way using a javascript via a web app. They have finally been able to get cross application copy and paste for Safari and Mail. See demo below:

This seems like a great work around but still a bit funky and it sucks that it only works for Safari and Mail. I am not sure if this works if you need to copy from e-mail to paste to another e-mail.

I hope now that the blackberry storm is out with copy/paste Apple will add this functionality in the next firmware update. This missing function will get the iPhone closer to perfection.