The iPhone and the clipboard: an uneasy alliance
I recently spent some time as a guest of the Ontario judicial system. No, not as a prisoner, something much more unpleasant: jury duty.
This is the second time in five years that I’ve “done my duty”, and in both instances the week consisted of 99% waiting around and 1% being rejected out-of-hand by defense counsel. I am, of course, crushed by the repeated rejections, but I managed to get some benefit from the other 99% of my week by reading a software development e-book.
When I went through this five years ago, I did my reading on a Dell Axim running Windows Mobile 5.0. You laugh, but let me tell you that one thing it did really well was copy and paste. You selected the text with the stylus (stop laughing), used a button to toggle to Word and pasted the text in. A task so simple even Windows Mobile could handle it.
Five years later, I’m using an iPhone. In technical terms, the iPhone is a Porsche and the Axim a Yugo. But when it comes to copy and paste, the Porsche is a freaking nightmare to drive.
The problem isn’t so much with the iPhone as with its apps. Very few of e-readers allow you to copy text into the clipboard. It’s bizarre! Do they think we don’t want that feature (we’re too dumb), or do they not trust us to use it responsibly (we’re too dishonest)? Either way, it’s insulting.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are two very, very good apps that do support the clipboard, and a growing number of e-books that are compatible with them.
Stanza. Stanza supports a long list of e-book formats, but unfortunately you are unlikely to encounter most of them when buying e-books. The 3 exceptions are:
- eReader – This is a “secure” (piracy-protected) format that is used by Fictionwise and Books on Board for most of their books, and by Barnes and Noble for many of them.
- ePub – The ePub format supported by Stanza is not “secure”, which unfortunately makes it harder to find (we’re dishonest, remember). However, if you’re a computer geek then you’re in luck: O’Reilly and Microsoft Press offer ePub editions of almost all of their publications.
- PDF – Support for PDF format documents was added to Stanza last week. Unfortunately, its copy support is pretty inconsistent, often copying gibberish to the clipboard.
GoodReader. GoodReader supports just one format, PDF, but that’s still the most commonly used format for technical publications. I’ve raved about this app before, and I’ve grown more and more impressed with it over time. They added clipboard support a couple of releases ago, and while its not the most convenient implementation (you can only copy a full page of text, not selected text), it is fast and reliable, just like the rest of GoodReader. I’ve yet to find a PDF that GoodReader couldn’t handle — amazingly, it loads 100 meg monsters faster than my desktop PC.
Once you’ve filled the iPhone’s clipboard, your options for pasting text are much better.
You might find that the built-in Notes app is good enough for this task. I use Pastebot – a lot of people rave about its advanced formatting features and automatic synchronization (Mac only), but I like the fact that it automatically saves the clipboard contents when you open the app. If you need to format the text after you paste it (change fonts, italics, etc.), you should consider Documents To Go. I’m really impressed with how quickly it manages to bring you back to your last spot in a document without multitasking — the app is ready to paste a couple of seconds after you click the launcher (on an iPhone 3GS).
The new iOS 4 will make the copy-and-paste process somewhat smoother with its support for multitasking and fast app switching: it might even be able to compete with Windows Mobile 5!
One last piece of good news: O’Reilly (and associated publisher, Microsoft Press) continue to make most of their books available as very inexpensive iPhone apps, generally $5 or $6. That’s the full book, pictures and all.
If you’ve bought one of these apps, you were probably disappointed to find that clipboard support was disabled. This seems to be related to the underlying version of Stanza (which their apps bundle with the e-book). For some reason Stanza quietly disabled clipboard support in an update to their app last year, then quietly re-enabled it in the next update. Hmm.
While O’Reilly continues to use the clipboard-disabled version of Stanza, it is easy enough to do the upgrade yourself. Just follow the process described in my earlier post to extract the ePub from the O’Reilly / Microsoft Press book app, then import the ePub into Stanza using their desktop app or a URL link.
I’m pretty sure that O’Reilly is OK with you doing so — as mentioned in my earlier post, it was O’Reilly themselves who originally documented the process. If not, maybe I’ll get yet another opportunity to read e-books as a guest of the Ontario judicial system!
