Updated 15 April 2009   .

iPhone 2,1 Wishlist

I'm a recent switcher to the iPhone after waiting in the wings a while for various reasons. I'm coming from about 5 years heavy use of a Treo 600 which I relied upon way too much, and swapping out what became essentially part of my brain and memory for something different was a bit of a shock, so a lot of these wishes are a direct result of being annoyed at something the old crappy thing can do much better than the new shiny thing.

And now that the evidence is mounting that Apple are aiming to release an update about mid-year I thought I'd get my thoughts out there (I know, I know... to be completely ignored).

Newsflash! iPhone SDK 3.0
On March 17 Apple held an event to announce and detail some of what's coming in the iPhone 3.0 SDK update, which thankfully seems to address a lot of my gripes. I've used strikethrough text to mark some of these, but the 3.0 update will also take care of the biggie: cut-and-paste (though I reckon my solution, taking advantage of wasted space for some extra buttons is better for the updated handsets than using their slightly hackey double-tap or tap-and-hold solution). Also, there's some evidence emerging of a camera update and storage bump for the new hardware models, so I'm a happy bunny

Cut and Paste. Seriously

I just can't fathom how the developers went so long without feeling the need for this. Cut and Paste has been with us for decades, is an integral part of interacting with any computer-like-thing, yet they left it right out. I agree that because of the iPhone's interface and ease of use you don't need it as much as you do on other platforms, but there's times you seriously, seriously need it, and you just sit there shaking your head before doing something daft like writing that long number/password/email/URL out on a napkin before typing it all back in again somewhere else, or spending a few minutes with your finger on the backspace key whilst it slowly trims away text in your reply to someone's 500 line email because you just want to quote ONE LITTLE BIT, NOT THE WHOLE VERDAMMT THING!

At first I waited expectantly for a software patch to fix this, but then I realized it really needs another button to allow access to the cut/copy/paste functions from anywhere, in any app. You either need to dedicate some screen real-estate to an omnipresent software button (which is a waste of precious screen space, and will scupper most apps' GUI designs) or add a hardware button (which I think is a good idea in any case).

Here's my solution:

You can see the pink hashed areas are completely wasted surface space on the iPhone. I love Apple's mantra of everything being as simple and minimal as possible, but they've gone just a step too far here. We need a button to access cut-and-paste, and if we're adding one we should add two! And let's not limit ourselves by making it a cut-and-paste only button, it can be a general context menu that apps can add to if they like (e.g. an 'About' box, access to preferences, more complex or seldom used features). I'm not sure what the left button should be used for, either leave it completely app driven, or you could configure it in the system prefs for quick access to your most used function (e.g. Phone or iPod). And I think the iPhone games developers would really appreciate some extra buttons.

So now we have a button for accessing a cut/copy/paste menu, but how would it work? Here's the workflow:

Step 1: Set the cursor at the start of the block
Step 2: Hit the Right Button menu and pick 'Select'
Step 3: Set the cursor to the end of the block, it highlights as it goes
Step 4: Hit the Right Button menu and pick 'Cut' or 'Copy' (and I'm sure you can imagine how 'Paste' works)

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