There are two possibilities regarding the iPhone’s continued lack of a system-wide copy-and-paste clipboard. Either Apple’s iPhone UI team doesn’t plan to add it, or, they haven’t gotten to it yet.

I saw a couple of links today pointing, incredulously, to this post from Sascha Segan at AppScout:

I got a few minutes of quality time today to ask Apple product
head Greg Joswiak some of the most burning questions about missing
iPhone applications and features.

Why isn’t there cut and paste? Apple has a priority list of
features, and they got as far as they could down that list with
this model, Joswiak said. In other words, they don’t have anything
against cut and paste. They just judged other things to be more
important.

So I linked yesterday to a piece by Jason Snell at Macworld regarding the different color temperature of new iPhone 3G displays. Snell asked iPhone product marketing director Bob Borchers (the same “Bob” from the iPhone Guided Tour videos, by the way) about the change, and Borchers said it was a deliberate design change.

At Ars Infinite Loop, however, Clint Ecker is reporting that the color change is slightly less warm/yellow in build 5A347 of the iPhone OS, as compared to build 5A345. This is confusing, so bear with me. 5A345 is the version that iPhone SDK members received as the final beta, and it is the version that many brand-new iPhone 3Gs shipped with from the factory. 5A347 is the very latest version, however, and so it is the one iTunes will download if you restore an iPhone [...]

On the iPhone’s App Store app, at the bottom of the details page for every app is a downloads count. Given that the only way to download a non-free app is to buy it, it more or less puts sales figures out in the open. These download numbers are not visible in iTunes — only in the App Store app.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, obviously, you can look at popular apps figure out how much money they (and Apple) have made. As I type this, Sega’s Super Monkey Ball game has been downloaded 10,955 times, and costs $9.99. That’s $109,440 in revenue in under a day [...]

The new issue of Wired has a nice 5,000-word piece by Daniel Roth offering a behind-the-scenes look at Google Android. More about Google’s (and their Android team’s) motivation and goals than about specific details of the platform, but interesting.

A big part of design is managing trade-offs. To crudely paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. A simple trade-off between two things is like a seesaw: move one up and the other goes down. Think, say, of buying a new external hard drive — the trade-off there is between higher storage capacity and lower price. Or, say, how big to make a push button — bigger buttons are easier to hit, but there’s only so much space on a screen. Multivariate trade-offs are more complicated, but the basic gist is the same: you can’t have your cake and eat it too...

A small housekeeping change here at DF: each Linked List entry now has its own unique permalink URL. So, for example, yesterday’s link to Andy Baio’s interview with The Big Picture’s Alan Taylor has a permanent URL here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/06/20/alan-taylor

A few observations regarding last week’s WWDC and related news: In my piece this week regarding the potential interest among existing iPhone users in upgrading to the new iPhone 3G, I neglected to mention what might be the single biggest factor: AT&T’s 3G wireless coverage. Things look good if you live in or near a major metropolitan area; if you don’t, well, I hope you like EDGE

So there’s been a surge in speculation today regarding Adobe’s efforts to get Flash support on the iPhone, after Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said the following during Adobe’s quarterly finance conference call yesterday:

“We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.”