> Q: Why did copy paste take so long?

> A: Scott: It's not that easy. There were security issues.

What does this mean? Could it be that with the iPhone, letting the user extract his own data from the device and sending it elsewhere is a "security" issue?

You download a game. You play it once. It sucks. Meanwhile, it has stolen your mail and phoned it back home to a server in Uzbekistan.

What does this have to do with copy and paste?

Copy and paste is a form of IPC. IPC needs to be secure, or (see above).

If you don't trust the free game you just downloaded, you might not want it to be able to see what's on the clipboard. Some number of people will copy their passwords, credit card numbers, etc. If an app phoned home the contents of the clipboard every time it ran, eventually it would pick up some private information.

And that's assuming that all the bug gives you is the cut buffer. Who knows how they were actually led to implement the feature?

I think perhaps it is more "bypassing of security" issues. On the iPhone applications don't get to interact with each other, so a breach must be made in that protection, and once breached it must be guarded.

Who cares about how big a step it is conceptually. The real question is why it was so hard technically.

I wonder if the buffer is outside the normal application sandbox.

I've just used it for the first time running the 3.0 beta. I copied a URL from an email into Safari. It Just Works, as you would expect. It is very intuitive - I deliberatly tried prior to reading a detailed review or watching the video of the presentation.