Unofficial iPhone Blog

With the iPhone v2.1 software out of the door, Apple is hard at work on v2.2. From this first glimpse it looks like Apple, now that the major bugs have been squashed, is adding some new features.

The screenshot, unearthed by iPhone Atlas, shows a new Safari interface. Above you see a shot from my iPod Touch (left) next to a picture of the new v2.2 Safari. In the new browser, Google gets its own search bar (instead of popping up when you hit the regular URL bar) and the reload button has been moved the address bar, a purely aesthetic change which helps the text-entry areas to look bigger.

Of course, there’s still no mention of copy and paste, a seemingly ridiculous omission from such a powerful device. But I have a theory: Apple won’t ever put it in, at least not in the form we currently know. The iPhone model is quite different from that of a proper computer. In a Mac or PC, you use the operating system to act on files, be they pictures, e-mails or text documents.

The iPhone works more like iTunes, where each application takes care of its own files and what you can do with them. Thus, in Safari, you can choose to send a picture to the Photo application, whence it is squirreled away into a filesystem only accessible through the same Photo application, or through a “media browser” (which is used to pick the desktop background, for example).

It’s possible that Apple is taking so long to implement copy and paste not because it is difficult, but because Apple is reinventing it. Imagine a system-wide menu added to all applications which, instead of shuffling items off to a clipboard, lists all the places you can send that file (or text string). This would be like the existing “Open with” option available in the Mac’s right-click menu — each application effectively reports to the OS exactly what kind of files it can handle and the OS remembers this. Thus a picture could be sent to not only the Photo app, but to any other photo program. Text could be sent directly to any open dialog box in, say, Safari.

Technically, this still uses a “clipboard” stack to store items temporarily, but the user experience changes to fit the iPhone’s one-open-app-at-a-time paradigm.

Of course, this is all speculation, but there has to be a reason why we can’t shift information around the iPhone more easily. Maybe this is it.

Share your URLs

If you want to send the URL of a Web page you’re viewing to a friend, tap the Address Bar, then tap Share. A new e-mail message, containing the URL, will open in Mail; just choose a recipient(s), add any comments you want to include, and tap Send

Scroll through separate boxes on a Web page

If you encounter a scrolling box or list when surfing Safari on your iPhone—say you’re responding to a post at some forums —and try to scroll using your finger, you’ll find that the entire page scrolls, instead of just the box. The trick is to zoom in and scroll such areas with two fingers.

Make a call from Safari

If you find a phone number in Safari that you’d like to call—say the phone number at a restaurant you’d like to make reservations at—there’s no need to jump to the phone component. Just tap the number; iPhone will dial it for you. (This is also the case with phone numbers and URL embedded in e-mails and SMS chats; tapping either one will place a call or open a Web page, respectively.)

Find out where those links go

When in Safari, holding your fingertip down on a link instead of tapping it produces an information balloon that displays the underlying URL. The same thing happens in Mail when you hold a link, which makes this tip much more useful. Now when those “account update” e-mails appear, you can press and hold on the link to find out if you’re really going to be taken to the site the e-mail claims.

Avoid Mail confusion

Don’t name two of your e-mail accounts with the same name in your iPhone, as Mail will get confused and copy the settings from one account to the other. And you can’t fix the situation by simply renaming one account; you’ll need to delete one of the accounts and then recreate it.

Mark previously-read messages as unread

There doesn’t appear to be a way to the mark a read message as unread on the iPhone, but it’s in there. While viewing a message, tap Details, which reveals a Mark As Unread option; tap it, and the next time you view your Inbox, the message will display the Unread indicator.

Recover ‘lost’ e-mails

Say you try to send an e-mail, but the iPhone can’t get network access. You might think your message has disappeared completely, but don’t worry—it’s still on your iPhone. A temporary Outgoing folder is created, and the message winds up in there. You can access this temporary folder from the main screen of the sending account; the folder will disappear once network access is available and the message is sent.

Create a home page in Safari

With the regular version of Safari that runs on your Mac (and now your Windows-based PC), setting a particular site as your home page is as simple as going to the General tab in Preferences and typing in a URL. You can’t do that on the iPhone, however.

But you can use this work-around: Add your would-be home page to your bookmarks list and then move it to the top of your bookmarks list. Yes it’s an extra tap—first the Bookmarks button and then the bookmark itself—but it will get you to your favorite Web page with a minimum of fuss.—DF