Back in August, a lot of iPhone users–myself included–got excited over OpenClip, a third-party attempt to bring the phone the cut-and-paste functionality that Apple has failed to deliver to date. OpenClip died before it was ever released, the victim of an attentive Apple sealing up the technical loophole that would have made it possible.

Now there’s a new grass-roots attempt to put cut-and-paste on the iPhone–one which is very different and at least as potentially promising. Pastebud will only work with Safari and e-mail messages, but that’s far from a dealbreaker, since those are the two applications you’re most likely to want to shuffle text between. (And OpenClip wouldn’t have supported them unless Apple got all kooky and jumped on the OpenClip bandwagon itself.) PasteBud is Web-based–it looks to be a form of bookmarklet–so it sidesteps the iPhone App Store altogether and doesn’t need Apple’s permission to do its work.

That’s all judging from Gizmodo’s post on Pastebud (with video demo), which also indicates that Pastebud is due on Friday and will come in both free and $5 versions. I can’t judge it until I’ve tried it–particularly just how easy it is to highlight text. But I’m looking forward to giving it a try. Even though–full disclosure–there have only been a couple of real-world incidents so far in which I’ve wanted to cut and paste something on my iPhone.

The Pastebud site isn’t up yet, but you can keep tabs on its status via Twitter.

(Running scissors art swiped from the Running With Scissors poster)

 
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