Name five reasons that the iPod Touch sucks and the lack of a COPY-PASTE feature will always figure prominently on the answers. For good reason, too, since COPY-PASTE is as basic and as necessary a feature as it can get, anytime you’re working with a gadget that handles email and text.
Pastebud, a new service, is trying to make up for that lack without having to jailbreak your iPod Touch unit. Of course, the solution isn’t perfect and is actually more of a workaround than a plug-in feature. Still, it sure beats having no COPY-PASTE functionality.
You equip your iPod Touch with Pastebud’s service by first adding two bookmarklets to your iPod Touch, the uncreatively monickered “COPY” and “PASTE”. You install them by dragging both bookmarklets to the Safari toolbar and then syncing.You can use both functions on Safari and the mail app. Everything else, sad to say, isn’t supported.
From Safari, you can use the COPY function by clicking the appropriate bookmark when you find a webpage you want to borrow text from. This will launch Pastebud’s web app with the text of the webpage displayed inside. From there you can select, highlight and copy any part of the text.
You can paste this text to either a web form by clicking on the PASTE bookmark while the cursor is in the field. For email, you will need to launch a new mail from Pastebud’s web app and find the appropriate section to place the new text in (email, title or body). For copying text from an email, you will need to send the mail to Pastebud’s servers. You will then get a link to a web app with the mailed text available for selecting and copying.
Definitely a complicated workaround for what’s supposed to be a simple feature. For a $5 service, though, it’s certainly worth it.