Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"This is why I love Mac developers - they see a problem and come up with an innovative, cool solution. If you've ever tried to copy and paste multiple lines of text, you know what a pain it is."

If you want to swap lines of text, this is the tool for you. It allows you to copy text that you are replacing with other text, while you are replacing it, if that makes sense. I've come across this problem in the past, as recently as yesterday, where I had to copy the text I wanted to replace, paste it on another line so I didn't lose it, then paste over the original line with the new text. Whew. It is a free download available here, and works on Snow Leopard.

Answering the biggest criticism of the iPhone since its inception, Apple added Cut, Copy and Paste to the iPhone's core apps as well as the ability for developers to add it. The implementation is seriously slick. In the case of Safari (shown above) you get handles that you can drag to resize the selection areas. The selection algorithm is similar to the tap to zoom algorithm Safari already uses.

In other applications, you get two handles and just drag them apart to select text (below).

Overall, the implementation is very slick (much more than I expected, frankly) and despite the fact that I don't really care whether or not I ever get CCP, I know a lot of you out there are doing a tap dance right now in anticipation of the new software! If nothing else, this ought to silence a very good chunk of the folks who ridiculously claimed that the iPhone is not a true smart phone as it is because it doesn't have copy and paste.

We'll have more individual feature coverage of the iPhone 3.0 event as the day goes on, so stay tuned!