We had recently written about Clippy Beta which brings Copy and Paste feature to the iPhone. We had also noted that it was an impressive attempt to bring the missing feature to the iPhone.

One of our readers, Matt, sent us an email to tell us that Jailbreak app called ℏClipboard which brings global copy and paste to the iPhone is better than Clippy. So I decided to check it out and was pleasantly surprised.

ℏClipboard is based on iKeyEx and is developed by iPhone developer, kennytm. You need a jailbroken iPhone to install ℏClipboard on your iPhone. After you have installed ℏClipboard on your jailbroken iPhone, you need to enable it via the Settings app as it is turned off by default.

You can enable it by going to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards and swipping your finger to turn On ℏClipboard keyboard.

  

Once it is enabled, you can switch to the ℏClipboard keyboard by tapping on the Globe button as seen below.

The ℏClipboard has the following buttons:

Copy button

Tapping on this button copies the entire contents of the text to the clipboard. The copied item will then be visible in the clipboard section of ℏClipboard keyboard.

Select from Here/Select to Here button

This button can be used to select portion of the text. So move the cursor to beginning of the text you want to copy and tap on Select from Here button and then go to the end of the text you want to copy and then tap Select to here button. This will copy portion of the text to the clipboard. However, I liked the ease of selecting text in Clippy rather than the "Select from here/Select to here" button of ℏClipboard.

Navigational buttons

You can use the navigation buttons "Move to beginning" and "Move to End" for quicker navigation.

If you want to paste the contents of the clipboard simply tap on the item in the clipboard. The item just pasted will move to the top of the clipboard.

The cool thing about this app as compared to Clippy is that it allows you to copy multiple items to the clipboard and gives you very easy access to the copied items thanks to the clipboard section. You can copy up to 10 items to the clipboard.

You can also delete items in the clipboard quite easily. Swipping your finger horizontally over an item enables the "Delete" button, tapping on it will remove the item from the clipboard.

Another interesting functionality of hClipboard is a secondary clipboard called Templates. The main difference between the primary clipboard and Templates is that Templates can be used to store infinite number of items while you can copy only 10 items to the primary clipboard. So you can use Templates to record frequently used text such as usernames while you can use the primary clipboard to copy and paste temporary items.

You can toggle between the primary Clipboard and Templates by tapping on the "Switch to Templates/Clipboard" button on the lower-left corner of ℏClipboard keyboard. I really liked the ability to copy multiple items and the idea behind templates.

 

Just like Clippy, one of limitiations of ℏClipboard as a keyboard extension is that it can only be used where iPhone's virtual keyboard could be enabled, so you cannot use it to copy text from iPhone's Safari browser. However, developer of aptly named CopyingTextFromSafari has provided a workaround to copy text from a webpage or the entire webpage on your iPhone using ℏClipboard. You can follow the instructions mentioned here to add the bookmarklets.

You can then use the bookmarklet to copy the entire contents of the webpage or the bookmarklet to copy text from a webpage in conjunction with ℏClipboard.

  

If
you want to copy text from an email you have received, then forward the
email which will enable iPhone's virtual keyboard and you can then use
the "copy" button. Similarly in case of SMS messages instead of using
the default SMS app, you can use jailbreak iPhone app biteSMS which
allows you to forward SMS which will enable iPhone's virtual keyboard and you can then use the "copy" button. The tip to copy text from SMS and Mail were given by Aleksander, one of our readers when we had posted a review about Clippy.

You can checkout the developer's website to find out the known issues.

ℏClipboard is easily the best Copy and Paste solution for the iPhone. If developer kennytm can implement Clippy's way of copying text and magically figure out a cleaner way to copy text by enabling iPhone's keyboard on a webpage then it would be the perfect Copy and Paste solution for the iPhone.

Thanks Matt for letting us know about ℏClipboard, you are right its a better application than Clippy which I think is also an impressive attempt to bring the missing feature to the iPhone.

In fact after looking at iPhone apps like ℏClipboard, I am looking forward to Apple's implementation of Copy and Paste feature even more.

Folks, what do you think about ℏClipboard? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.