iPhone News Updated

Developer nails copy/paste with upcoming iPhone app

If you’re one of the many waiting for Apple to get its act together and offer a copy/paste feature on the iPhone, there’s a promising development called MagicPad from software creator Proximi. It’s an application similar to the notes tool that ships with the iPhone. The big difference is that it’s got support for multiple fonts; rich text elements like underlining, italics, and strikethroughs; and the much-wanted copy/paste.

It manages to do all this by adding a small toolbar over the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. Using the small loop magnifier you can highlight strings of text, then copy them into a virtual clipboard. From there it can be pasted into other notes, then sent off. Unfortunately you can’t carry the clipboard to other applications, which is what most people are hoping Apple will provide.

Posted after the break is a video of the yet-to-be-released application in action, which was made by AppleiPhoneNotes.com. One thing that might keep MagicPad from making it onto the device is if it does not meet Apple’s stringent human interface guidelines, which protect things like the keyboard configuration to keep the end user from getting confused.

(Via Macrumors)

Write notes, and use rich text elements including copy and paste, with MagicPad.

(Credit: Proximi)

First Look - MagicPad from Apple iPhone Apps on Vimeo.

The seal on Apple’s iPhone SDK is leaking, even within Apple

In my Ahead of the Curve post entitled “Apple’s iPhone contracts leave developers speechless,” I pointed out that the Registered Developer, Developer Program and SDK Agreements forbid iPhone developers, including those who obtained the SDK for free, from talking with each other unless they work for the same company. It’s the first time I’ve seen a vendor declare that the public can’t discuss publicly-available information.

Apple is poisoning its own well, but no one need wonder why iPhone developers aren’t in an uproar over the NDA. Developers value App Store as an effortless delivery, update and payment mechanism for shareware. App Store is the tastiest developer benefit Apple has, and its beneficiaries aren’t about to bite any hands.

Developers may like what they see in App Store, but for consumers the experience is, so far, a mixed bag. Read the consumer comments for most of the free or inexpensive App Store programs and you’ll see that stability and usability complaints top users’ remarks. Even though the Xcode tools are sweet, iPhone development, like Mac platform development, is not easy. Mac coders raise up other Mac coders. iPhone developers are stuck having to teach themselves, and the gem to junk ratio on App Store is the result.

Can Apple really be serious about keeping the publicly-available iPhone SDK under tight NDA? This post from the moderator of Apple’s cocoa-dev mailing list, dated July 10, 2008, sums up the company line more succinctly than Apple’s lawyers have done:

Until an announcement is made otherwise, developers should be aware that the iPhone SDK is still under non-disclosure. It can’t be discussed here, or anywhere publicly. This includes other mailing lists, forums, and definitely blogs.

[...]

When the SDK is lifted an announcement will be made here.

Thanks for your understanding

Scott
[moderator]

I think he meant to say “When the NDA is lifted…” I take it as a hopeful sign that Scott [moderator] thinks the NDA will be lifted one day. Until then, he’s drawn an unequivocal line in the sand: No iPhone talk on Apple’s cocoa-dev mailing list.

Apple doesn’t apply Scott’s cut and dried ethics everywhere. Search for “iPhone SDK” in Apple’s official discussion groups. You might not see the results that I did when I looked, so I took a snapshot that you may find either silly or revealing:

If you click on one of these struck-through post summaries, you’ll be taken to the plainly rendered, unexpurgated thread. I can almost parse Apple’s contracts, but the closest I can get to making sense of this readable redaction is that Apple tolerates discussion among iPhone developers as long as they know it’s wrong.

Are some stewards of Apple’s iPhone secrets ambivalent about keeping them under wraps?

Could be. I doubt that an editor at Apress would put an iPhone 2.0 SDK book on the calendar without a green light from Apple. If this title stays listed on Amazon, that means that Apple is either issuing explicit exceptions to the NDA or just selectively looking the other way. If Apple wants its NDA adhered to, then the NDA holes made by Apple’s discussion groups and this planned book need to be plugged. I’d rather they weren’t, and that what we’re seeing is a tacit relaxation of the NDA.

Posted by Tom Yager
http://weblog.infoworld.com