Pastebud, the new service which is aiming to bring the strangely missing Copy and Paste feature to the iPhone has just been released.
So you will finally be able to copy text from iPhone’s Safari browser
to the Mail app and also between web pages without jailbreaking your iPhone.
It works exactly as I had described yesterday and also includes a feature to copy contents from an email.
Pastebud essentially consists of two bookmarklets, aptly named "COPY" and "PASTE" that you need to install on your iPhone’s Safari browser.
You can either use the easier method which is to drag the bookmarklets to your desktop browser’s toolbar and sync it to your iPhone (works with only Safari and Internet Explorer as they sync with iTunes) or go to Pastebud’s website using your iPhone’s Safari browser and add the bookmarks. However, if you use the second option, you will have to manually edit the bookmarks to remove all the formatting before the javascript: code.
Once you’ve installed the bookmarklets, you can go to any web page containing text you
want to copy, hit the "COPY" bookmark.
The text of the web page is sent to Pastebud and put into its web app, where you select the particular text to copy by tapping and
dragging to select.
You have couple of buttons at the top, the button to the top-left corner will open iPhone’s mail app and paste the content you have copied (along with links) to a new email message. The button to the top-right corner takes you back to the web page in iPhone’s Safari browser.
You can also paste the copied contents to a web form in your iPhone’s Safari browser. You can go to any web page which has a form and then hit the "PASTE" bookmark. It sends the content of the web form and puts it into its web app, where you can paste the text in areas highlighted with the text "PASTE HERE". Tapping on any one of them will result in the text getting copied to the web form.
Though I haven’t tried it out, based on the images available on Pastebud’s website, it seems to also offer another feature which I had not covered yesterday. You can copy the contents from an email, by forwarding the email you want to copy from "to your secret Pastebud address". You will get a reply with the link of their web app which has the contents of the email, where you select the particular text to copy by tapping and
dragging to select.
You can also checkout the video demo of Pastebud in my previous post.
The service works quite well and finally brings not an ideal copy
and paste solution but some sort of copy and paste feature to the
iPhone.
Other than that the service has a few hassles:
It inserts a little "Pasted from my iPhone!" and promotion link in every paste.
You also get a little pop-up box when you paste contents, asking you to upgrade for $5 to "make it even more convenient".
Both these issues can be addressed by paying the developers $5 for their effort.
The other concern of this service, after understanding how it all works is privacy issue. Here is what they have to say about this concern:
It’s certainly safe enough for most uses. All clipboards are anonymous,
and destroyed withing five minutes of copy. Email addresses are not
saved on the server; we only use them to reply for copying.
However, since your text is being sent in an unencrpyted form, I would advice you to avoid sending anything sensitive.
The developers are planning to tackle the privacy concern by introducing premium features in the near furture.
We’ll be focusing
on the next set of premium features, including SSL, destroy-on-paste,
and other security functionality, as well as enhanced customization for
all users.
It looks like they are currently getting slammed with traffic so you
might find some availability issues (which might result in the
functionality not working all the time).
As always, don’t forget to drop us a line to tell us what you think of Pastebud and its bookmarklet workaround in the comments.
[via Pastebud]
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