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Pastebot, an app from Tapbots, is available for US$2.99 at the App Store.
Was it only six months ago that the iPhone didn't even have cut and paste? So glad that's behind us.
In the range of problems and obstacles a person encounters in life, being unable to transfer text on a smartphone was barely worth a brainwave -- until the moment you actually needed to cut and paste something, and all you could do was sigh and sadly write on your hand with a ballpoint pen. Equilibrium would usually return after about two seconds of that little indignity, but whatever, it's all in the past now.
What Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) did eventually come up with as a cut-and-paste function works fairly well for a device that doesn't have a physical keypad, though it's still not nearly as crisp as using a keyboard and mouse. Also, without a filing system that lets you create and arrange new folders as you choose, or the ability to run multiple apps at a time (exceptions excepted), you're facing a many-app runaround if you need to do a whole lot of cross-app copying and pasting. You're saving pictures in your photo roll, mixed in with all the shots you took yourself; and text presumably gets deposited into a long Notes page.
That might not sound like such a pain to those who only use the cut and paste function on the iPhone casually, but busier users may appreciate Pastebot. It's essentially a cross-application clipboard tool that neatly organizes all of your copied content into one place, lets you edit it there, and sets it back onto your active clipboard when you're ready to put it somewhere.
How It Works
To use Pastebot, go into an email, a note, a Web page, or any other app that lets you select and copy/cut content. Grab some text or an image and copy it using the iPhone's built-in copy/paste function. Exit the app, open Pastebot, and you'll find that the content has been automatically saved as a new entry on Pastebot's own clipboard. It can be kept there indefinitely, or even moved into new Pastebot files that you create.
Once they're copied and deposited in Pastebot, images can be manipulated with a few simple tools like a black and white filter, a brightness adjuster, an inverter, a sepia filter and a saturation adjuster. You can also send an image to your Photos collection or an email. Text entries can be edited using a keypad as well as a wide variety of filters -- convert to uppercase, encode HTML entities, straighten or smarten the quote marks, find and replace, etc.
Once you're ready to put your stored image or text somewhere, go to Pastebot, tap the thumbnail entry, and a blue light next to it will turn on. Now it's on your main clipboard -- close Pastebot, go to where you want to put it, and paste.
Mac users can also sync their clippings between the phone and the computer using an additional Mac application.
Lack of Background
Even though Pastebot does make heavy cut-and-paste work a little simpler, it left me wondering how much better it would be if the iPhone would allow background apps. As it is, even with Pastebot, there's still some runaround -- close this before you open that, close that to go back to this, etc. It's not very smooth at all when the app you're using is eight screens away from where you keep Pastebot. If you're a true cut-and-paste fiend, you may want to give Pastebot a seat on the almighty Bottom Row.
Also, Pastebot cannot pick up multiple copies in the same visit to any particular app. If you want to grab more than one item from the same page, you have to go back and forth.
For example, if you were looking at a Web page showing the Ghettysburg Address, copied the phrase "Four score and seven years ago," then immediately scrolled down and copied the phrase "shall not perish from the earth," only the latter will make it into Pastebot. This might have to do with the inability to run background apps as well -- if Pastebot can't run while another app's on stage, it can't learn what the clipboard just picked up every time it grabs something new.
Since these shortcomings appear to be based on an iPhone limitation rather than an app design problem, it's hard to hold them against Tapbots too severely. The iPhone's one-at-a-time rule is a fact of life for now; it'll be interesting to see what developers do when Apple eventually allows background apps in a future model (bound to happen soon ... right?).
Bottom Line
Pastebot's main functionality doesn't exactly add a brand-new feature to the iPhone -- you can save multiple clippings in Notes and Photos if you want to. Pastebot's main talent is smoothing out the act of dropping clipboard material off and picking it back up later. You only have to deal with that sometimes-laggy cut/copy/paste menu and those little hard-to-handle blue field-marker dots once; Pastebot helps out from there. And you get some editing tools that Photos and Notes don't have, as well as the sync option.
It would certainly be nice if you didn't have to exit the program you're using in order to deal with Pastebot, but the iPhone's lack of multi-app is a whole other issue. For now, iPhone users with serious cutting habits may find things operate a little smoother with Pastebot around.
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