One of the drawbacks with the iPhone is that there’s no way to copy and paste. Two reasons; firstly, there’s no way to select a chunk of text in the first place (because the “touch and drag” movement either moves the page, or moves the cursor, depending on the context), but also there’s no clipboard, so even if you could select and copy something and save it in the memory, you wouldn’t be able to get at it from another different application.

One consequence of this is that if you’re trying to write a blog from the iPhone, it’s difficult to post a link to te site you’re blogging about because you have to remember the link and type it in yourself. Not a problem with what’s called “clean urls” (eg http://somerandomnerd.com/miphone) but a pain in the neck if you’re trying to link to http://example.com/482648-261_382.html?tag=something.mt

So it was a fiddly task to tell you that I came across this post on a productivity website about 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone. If you’ve got an iPhone, I strongly recommend you take a look. (But not from your phone, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.)

A bookmarklet is a bit like a bookmark, except instead of containing a link to a web page, it contains a piece of Javascript code which carries out an action on the page. For example, it might check through the page and find a word that you’re looking for, and highlight it if it finds it. These can add some very useful functionality to the browser (such as the Find feature.)

The only drawback is that you can’t (as far as I know) add them straight onto your phone- you need to add them to your bookmarks on your desktop PC browser, then synchronize with iTunes to put them.

I guess that until there’s a way to copy and paste links on the iPhone, there’s no real way around it. Unless someone writes a bookmarklet that will let you select a bookmarklet link and save it to your bookmarks. But you’d have to sync that bookmarklet through iTunes first of all.

Even if you wanted to type the javascript in yourself, the iPhone does t let you add bookmarks that way- you can only bookmark links to the page that you’re on, and bookmarklets don’t have a “page.”

This is one of the problems with the iPhone being tethered to a PC, as well as a limitation of the user interface, so I can’t see there being an easy fix any time soon. It will be interesting to see whether any other touchscreen systems (like Android) will be able to get around this limitation though.

Be Sociable, Share!