So the story goes like this.
I’m sitting at the iPhone Dev Camp 2 in this cool demo by Proximi on how to implement copy and paste on the iPhone. I am simply blown away by the amount of thought Proximi has put into this issue. The slide-show is worth watching for everyone interested in user interface design issues.
It is clear that the answers to multi-touch problems faced on the iPhone will see broad use in the future. I am very happy Apple and the App Store developers are leading the direction of this conversation as I believe we are in good hands. Proximi is an excellent example of how early App Store developers are passionate about building social, multi-touch and location aware solutions that are both easy to use and powerful.
In any case, the guy from Proximi goes through his slides in 15 minutes and then opens the floor for discussion. Zac White immediately chimes in with a new perspective. What followed was a 5 minute back and forth between two developers who had never met before.
Yes, it is true that applications can only write to their own bundles (each is in their own sandbox). But… every application can READ from the entire phone. Zac suggests that each application write to a specific place in its bundle “copy location” that can then be read from every application. Zac started writing the code earlier that day to review all of these areas and grab the latest data.
Proximi’ definition of a “targeted field” (seen in the 7th minute of their presentation) helped Zac figure out a few hooks to let his library use the results.
This short and public discussion laid the groundwork for what is shaping up to be the copy and paste solution for the iPhone (at least until Apple chimes in!) Proximi’s, MagicPad and Skorpiostech’s Cocktails demonstrated working version of Zac’s code within 24 hours. I see now that both WordPress and Twitallator are jumping on board. Yeah!!!
Open Source is the future (Zac libraries are Open Source)! Everything is possible when we work together to solve common problems =)