CopiercIN - True Copy and Paste Text between Notes, SMS and Email on your iPhone - For FREE!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 by Aaron Besson
Category: 3G iPhone, Apple News, What's New, iPhone, iPhone Apps/Games.

It’s been a long day. I am now looking through my emails and RSS feeds wonding if I would take the time to mention SwirlyMMS leaked for 2.0+ via iSpazio on Cydia or if to talk about the rumors of AT&T Working on Voip and TV service for iPhone customers in the US.

No - I am going to post about this great new app I just found on Cydia, it’s called CopiercIN. It is True Copy and Paste Text between Notes, SMS and Email on your iPhone - For FREE!!

You can import sms, notes, emails and txt documents for now, and paste then together, and then export the pasted/typed text to an email, sms or note all within CopiercIN. The developer has stated that he has plans to release this as open source and expand CopiercIN’s features to Safari and other apps. But this is a wonderful solution to a big problem. Now only if there was a way for this to work with AppStore and Third Party Dev Apps like Wordpress, MagicPad and TextGuru.

Screenshots below and video after in a couple mins:

CopiercIN - Copy, Paste Notes, SMS, Email on your iPhone FRE from MyTriniPhone on Vimeo.

Known Issues:

1. Selection highlighting is very buggy, but usually not a big obstacle:
* You might see a selection is made when you are trying to scroll the page. Just touch on somewhere on the text and the selection will be cleared.
* Spaces or line endings might get lost during or after selecting process. For example, if you start selecting just before a space character, this spce character gets lost once you clear the selection.
* After making a selection, if you type something from keyboard, selection stays and extends to contain the newly entered text. If you press copy, this newly entered text is also copied. Actually, this is not a bug, it is a feature
* There might be more I can’t remember. These are the ones that I see occasionaly.
2. Only UTF8 strings are supported. I did not do much encoding checks and the application will probably crash if you try to import or export non-UTF8 strings. I have tested the application with only Turkish (and thus also English) characters up to now and it seemt to work flawlessly.
3. If you manage to export a non-UTF8 text as a new Note and the application does not crash, there is a high probability that it will crash when you are trying to import that note. Besides that, the last entry of the Notes application might get corrupted. It would be best to open Notes application and see if the last entry can be viewed correctly or not.
4. Only first 500 (or something) characters are imported from eMails. Unfortunately, this is not a bug; I just couldn’t manage to read the entire contents. For now, only this summary part is imported. There shouldn’t be a limit on exporting though.
5. There are some issues with cursor position. After “cut”ting, you might see the cursor is put into a strange place. Also, after pasting, the cursor is set to the beginning of the pasted text instead of being set to the end of it.
6. The tables look ugly, well, yeah. I should change the font size at least.
7. Double tapping on the text will disable selection and it will just show the magnifier. Not a bug, but a feature again
8. You might see nothing instead of mailboxes. This probably happens when the Mobile Mail Application was just in the middle of downloading new messages. Opening the mail application, waiting until it finishes loading new messages (until the loading animation-the turning circle disappears) and reopening CopierciN should correct the problem
9. Meanwhile, mailbox folders are not divided into accounts, thus you will see a list of all folders from all accounts. This might be confusing with folders with same name in different accounts.
10. Be sure to have a valid 2.x.x compatible notes database. I realized that the database format for notes.db is different in 1.x and 2.x firmwares. Thus, if you had just copied your notes database from your 1.1.4 iPhone after upgrading to 2.x, you might not be able to import or export notes. If this becomes an issue for majority of the users, I might add a compatibility version in the later releases.
11. Short message groups are not ordered by the latest short message date as it is done in SMS application. For now, you have to look for the sender (or receiver).

Future work:

* Integration with Safari: What I have in mind is to make the application load web pages from Safari bookmarks or history. After downloading the page, it will be converted to plain text (I am not sure how it would work with exact contents, I will look into it). Once it is converted, you can select and copy as you would do with other kind of texts. Pasting into a form object would be the problem though. Again, what I have in mind is copying the text into a cookie or something which can be read with a javascript bookmarklet. After that, this javascript bookmarklet can be used to paste this text into the selected text field. I actually am thinking aloud right now, I do not know this pasting thing can be made to work or not.
* Contact list: This can be useful as there is no easy way to send a contact information with a short message or eMail. It is not very hard in theory but I should prepare a nice import interface to make it easier to list and select a contact.
* Plugin support: It would be nice to make it possible to write plugins to import/export to/from other applications. Hardcoding it for all the applications is just well, bad
* Making a clipboard framework: just like suggested by www.openclip.org, people can write their applications which use the same file as clipboard. This way we can have applications sharing the same clipboard and some kind of system-wide copy/paste functionality. That is, if Apple insists on not putting this functionality with a firmware. I respect the idea of www.openclip.org but well, it is just hard without jailbroken phones. By the way, I might integrate my application with the openclip framework in the future. I saw this project just a few days ago, or else I would already be working on that.
* Just leave a comment if you have any other thing in mind.