The first iPhone didn’t have copy and paste. Ex-employee explains why

Despite the fact that the very first iPhone from 2007 turned the smartphone market upside down and became the basis for modern smartphones, it is still very different from current gadgets (including in terms of functionality). One of the most obvious examples is the lack of copy and paste functionality, which was added only with the release of the iPhoneOS 3.0 operating system in 2009. Former Apple employee Ken Kocienda explained why this happened. He joined the corporation in 2001 and before working on the first Apple smartphone, he was already one of the key engineers on the team that creates the Safari browser. It is reported by 9To5Mac.

The reason for the lack of copy and paste in the first iPhone is quite simple – there was simply no time to implement it. And if there were no difficulties with the creation of the clipboard (at least, Kocienda did not report them), then there were difficulties with other aspects. According to Ken, he came up with the same magnifying glass that appears when you select the place to insert text, but even it did not save you from problems – when the user lifted his finger from the place where he wanted to insert the text, the cursor jumped to another area. Because of this, the developers had to come up with a “touch log”.

Kocienda also revealed other nuances, among which is the creation of a larger virtual area than the objects in the interface. This is due to the fact that the user’s perception of where they clicked on the screen and their actual click location are different – the system had to “predict” what the user really wanted to touch. This feature also came in handy for the keyboard’s auto-correct feature, as it identifies the letters surrounding the incorrect one.

Source: Trash Box

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