TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Gruber commented today on copy and paste in the iPhone, whose lack of it has become the go-to reason to criticize the iPhone. Some wonder why Apple hasn’t implemented it when copy and paste seems like such an easy feature to add.

Gruber explains:

Writing the code to implement a system-wide clipboard isn’t the hard part — as I wrote in August, the hard part is coming up the right UI design for it. Whatever the UI for copy-and-paste for the iPhone OS eventually is, it’s very likely to remain as the UI for copy-and-paste on the iPhone for decades to come. (The basic UI for copy-and-paste on the original Mac remains in use today by everyone using Mac OS X and Windows — same concepts, same menu commands, even the same keyboard shortcuts.)

That’s a point that no one has made. Apple is developing the user interface for their future mobile devices, and, really, the rest of the industry’s, too. This isn’t something Apple should throw together to lengthen the feature list a bullet point — they need to get it right.