Why the iPhone doesn't have copy+paste | Hacker News Reader

Why the iPhone doesn't have copy+paste

daringfireball.net

27 pointsdavid12 comments

This article's justifications for why the feature is missing typifies everything I hate about macs and their apologists. It's the whole 'we know better than you' about what you should be allowed to do. Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use and even viruses/trojans any day over this sterile Mac-world

...back in my day, we didn't try to improve on user interfaces or advance the state of the art. We had viruses and trojans and we liked it!

Well, if they've created the hardware and the environment and done a lot of brainstorming, experimenting, and researching how to make the design work, maybe they do know better than their users what they want. Most people probably don't spend all their time thinking of new ways to use a phone. If you decide Apple is wrong, just don't buy their products.

I do like open systems (linux/smalltalk/etc.), but then it seems like you still have a choice between using something someone else has designed for you, or doing it yourself. Developers can make systems configurable, but it doesn't seem like configuration options are always that creative, and they can get annoying after a while.

I guess the best thing a designer can do is make systems easy for hackers to extend, but someone is going to have to create a design somewhere, or else the end product isn't going to be very good.

> Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use...

Yeah, Linux is great for people like us!

> ...and even viruses/trojans any day...

Oh, Windows. Yuck.

I haven't missed copy and paste. I'm glad that they left it out, because it's another chance to introduce even more bugs into the iPhone (the thing crashes around once every other day).

Yes, it's best not to introduce more features lest they introduce more bugs. Let's just use white shiny plastic boxes connected with a metal cable then, shall we?

I'm not sure what your point is, but I'll take the iPhone the way it is now rather than chance even more bugs. There's no reason to need copy and paste except under extremely specific circumstances that don't come up often.

It's not a laptop.

Actually there is. I use a blackberry which also has a similar feature - if a number on a web page looks like a phone number you can just click it and it will call the number. However I routinely need to copy paste things from one email to another or from a web page to an email.

You may be happy with your iphone, good for you. My point is that you can't call a feature extraneous just because you don't need it and that if you have to reduce features to reduce bugs you have a very serious problem. If your engineers are prone to writing buggy code, the product will be buggy even if it has very few features and vice versa.

I use an iPhone daily and there have only been a few times I've missed copy and paste. Usually it's been when I'm tapping out a reply email or posting on a site such as YC News and need to quote someone. To route around the lack of copy and paste my replies end up being similar to using a word you know how to spell instead of one you don't; I just write what I think rather than writing about what someone else has written and think nothing of it. There are certainly cases when this analogy doesn't hold and copy and paste functionality would be nice, but it's definitely by design that there isn't one.

Constraining developers and themselves to create simpler ways to do things is smart of Apple. Emailing photos is the perfect example: I want to email this photo that is on my screen -- not open my "photo application", copy a photo, go back to the main screen, open my "email application" and paste the photo. Most of the copy and paste scenarios can be handled in a similar way: links to maps, links to phone numbers, links to URLs, and so on.

Maybe there are better ways to perform actions on mobile platforms instead of following the decades-old clunky mouse way to do them?

because is the not the nokia N95

apple repeated the same mistake they made with the mac 20 years ago, thats why the will never lead the mobile market.

oh, man. now there is a bet i would really, really like to take.

i used a motorola razr for a year, then got an iphone as soon as possible. i wouldn't go back for any reason.

I think it is retarded that I have to manually re-write stuff that is already in an email into a text message or vice versa. At least several times every day I wish my iphone had copy and paste

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