Apple launched its first iPhone 15 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Suffice it to say that the next model of Apple’s smartphone will record video in 8K, while the company’s very first smartphone did not even have the “Copy and Paste” option. And now the former engineer And Kitchen he told us why.
Copy and Paste: why the first iPhone did not have this option?
Close to the 15th anniversary of the iPhone, the former engineer Kocienda revealed some interesting details about the first model launched on the market. As anticipated, the phone lacked the “Copy and Paste” option, because it seems that the engineering team did not have time to implement it. Apparently, in fact, everyone was already busy creating the virtual keyboard of the iPhone and its automatic correction system. And so, only after the actual launch of the smartphone, Kocienda and his team set to work on the option to be implemented.
In this regard, the engineer revealed that he had the intuition of the “text magnifier” to help users understand which words were really selecting. A useful tool for the “Copy and Paste” function. Yet even so it was difficult to manage the text cursor, which ended up moving from one letter to another every time a user lifted their finger from the display. Therefore, Kocienda tried to solve the problem with a “tap history log”, allowing the cursor to stay right where the user wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjESdHPGB0
Another interesting detail concerns the text entry system. Apparently, all text styles were originally based on WebKit. This means that whenever an App used a custom font, it would eventually show a small web page for rendering the text. And when the text fields weren’t in edit mode, they showed a static image of their content, probably to save CPU, RAM, and battery. Finally, Kocienda says that the “Copy and Paste” options have been added to iPhone OS 3.0 in 2009, pre-installed by default on iPhone 3GS. From that point on, users’ lives have undoubtedly been simpler.