Copy and Paste coming soon with iPhone firmware 2.1 - Hopefully

By Aaron Besson at 25 July, 2008, 7:46 am

Engadget is reporting that Apple has started seeding 2.1 Beta 1, Build 5F90 Firmware to beta testers and developers and they are already reporting some great improvements over 2. I had already mentioned that 2.0.1 was being circulated internally by Apple and some of it’s trusted beta testers, but 2.0.1 is mainly bug fixes to 2.0 long list of gremlins.

2.1 on the other hand seems to be chock full of surprises. Having a look at the WebKit framework there are commands for “plugins,” “copy,” “paste,” “cut,” and some others. It is still unclear if this is simply code left over from the Apples Desktop OS X, but it is highly unlikely.

Maybe Apple saw the work of the Developer that submitted the Copy and Paste App and decided to buy/license it from them. Rumor has it they did the same thing with the Handwriting regocnition software that was submitted to th AppStore that made it’s way into Japanese and Chinese iPhone Firmwares.

Courtesy Engadget

This is a screen shot of an app that was submitted to the AppStore (by a developer that I cant find the name of) that shows their App that has cut, copy and paste features.

Apple has always said that they were thinking of adding Copy and Paste, but they had bigger things to deal with. Hopefully someone else has done all the hard work for them and all they need to do is give the App permissions and tweak it so that it works through out the operating system and between Apps. Because without a real clipboard that allows you to copy and paste text/urls/email addresses between safari and mail or a third party aapp like Wordpress, this new feature will be worthless for the msot part.

Update thanks to MacRumors:

… Apple has included new Core Location features that might suggest that turn-by-turn GPS could become a reality. Core Location can reportedly track your direction and the speed at which you are traveling.

Along with the new firmware, Apple has also seeded a new version of the iPhone SDK but the new SDK can not be used to submit Apps to the current App Store. There have been earlier reports that Firmware 2.0.1 had been spotted in the wild, but a 2.1 upgrade would presumably introduce more than just bug fixes.

Update: Besides Core Location speed and heading additions, Apple has also included early Push Notifications APIs that allows applications to process notifications in the background. Apple promised this feature by September.

This photo courtesy Gizmodo and Gear Live