Tag Archives: Copy

Iphone Clipboard Concept for Cut, Copy, Paste

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One of the current drawback of certain touch devices (Iphone) is it’s lack of copy/paste functionality. The difficultly in creating this functionality on a mobile device is that the interaction technique has to be non-intrucive to the core interface. 

Unlike a desktop application where you can toss commands into a menu the interaction model on a phone has to be more direct and gestural.  The copy/paste model I’m proposing tries to address some of these issues. 

When a user is viewing a core text area:

  1. They can scroll (tap + drag ).
  2. They can move the insertion pointer (tap)
  3. They can use the magnifier loupe to position the insertion pointer (tap+hold)
In my illustration you could activate additional copy/paste gestures:
  1. You can bring up the copy/paste pallet ( tap+tap near the insertion pointer)
  2. Once the panel is open you can mark a selection (tap+dragging) from the insertion point creates a selection. Similarly you could create a selection with two fingers marking both corners..
  3. When in copy/paste mode the keyboard is replaced by your recently cut/copied blocks of text or images.  You can tap a piece of text to insert it into your document 
Note: The tap+tap gesture is sometimes used in application to zoom however it is never used to zoom while editing text or viewing read-only text such as in emails or contact lists. 
Unfortunately at this point it’s not possible for third party application developers to write an extension such as this so it’s a concept sketch only at this point. 
P.S. Did you know we’re now developing and designing mobile apps?  Check out our latest design work for a new fitness startup focused on running. 

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Photoshop can’t Copy Paste into Word

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If you make a selection in Adobe Photoshop and try to paste it into Microsoft Word it won’t work well (and sometimes won’t work at all). Microsoft and Adobe are trying to use OLE (object linking and embeding) a novel concept from the 90′s that just doesn’t work very well. Once you paste the PhotoShop file into Word it’s litterly embeded and you can double click the object to open it back in Photoshop. Nice concept but it doesn’t work well. Once pasted in Word you can’t do even simple manipulations in Word such as resizing, cropping or anything else using Word.

The file size gets significantly larger because you have now pasted a bunch of extra info into Word and in addition the quality tends to be much lower. As an extra bouns instead of just loading Word you’re now loading Photoshop and Word at the same time. Ugh. OLE is pretty terrible and only programs that have been around since the 90′s still support it as a legacy thing.
The solution is to copy from PhotoShop, Paste into MS Paint, Copy from MS Paint and paste into Microsoft Word. The extra step is a pain. I’ve been using this trick for years and every time I get a new version of Word or Photoshop I hope that someone will have fixed this ‘feature.

P.S. You can also use Word’s ‘paste special’ to work around this as well but there’s nothing special about what I’m doing. Pasting an image without the embeded part should be the default.

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