Cut and Paste

This is interesting…

John Gruber remarked on the lack of a clipboard on the iPhone and I found myself missing that feature this afternoon. Steven Johnson suggested a double-click of the Home button as a shortcut to the phone favorites screen to shorten initiation times for frequent calls. Both of these observations beg the question: how are new capabilities going to get added to the iPhone? A bunch of you are either interaction/interface designers or otherwise clever folks…how would you add a feature like a clipboard to the iPhone?

It’s an interesting issue when you think about the gestures you’re allowed to use on the iPhone. Tap, swipe, pinch. There’s only so much you can do. I was thinking that there needed to be an edit button to change the behavior of the swipe motion, but that probably violates 7 kinds of UI usability rules.

Now I think that the answer lies in the magnifying glass.

Put another, smaller circle at “2 o’clock” with a small scissors icon in it.

The user targets the starting point with the loupe, then clicks the scissors.

If you imagine using your right index finger to move the loupe, your middle finger would be the one to enact the scissors icon. Click once to start and once to stop the selection.

Then target the field for pasting, and the scissors becomes a stamp.

You could even make the position of the action icon (11 o’clock or 2 o’clock) configurable for lefties.