Is the clipboard officially called "pasteboard" on iOS?

Question

I am writing an iOS app and I just want to make sure I call it the appropriate thing. I'm used to clipboard but apparently Apple calls it a pasteboard on iOS. Googling doesn't turn anything specific up.

I see the class is called UIPasteboard but I'm just looking to verify the literature/end user communication uses this term as well.

Answer 1

Yes, UIPasteboard is the clipboard (or the service behind the copy and paste feature). Most users are unlikely to know what either pasteboard or clipboard means. If you're describing the feature you should probably use the simple 'copy & paste' terminology.

Answer 2

from ios development cookbook :

Pasteboards, also known as clipboards on some systems, provide a central OS feature for sharing data across applications. Users can copy data to the pasteboard in one application, switch tasks, and then paste that data into another application. Cut/copy/paste features are similar to those found in most operating systems. Users can also copy and paste within a single application, when switching between text fields or views.

so to answer your question yes, clipboard is called pasteboard in iOS.

Answer 3

I have the same question: which string is preferable to show to the user?

1. "Copy"
2. "Copy to Clipboard"
3. "Copy to Pasteboard"

Looking at the standard built-in apps on iOS 12, it looks like the first form ("Copy") is used almost everywhere.

Doing some more research, I googled for pages containing "pasteboard" on site:help.apple.com, and found pages such as https://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.7/English.lproj/_1128.html which include text like You can also copy the last spoken phrase to the Clipboard (also called the “Pasteboard”) by pressing VO-Shift-C. But note that this is a page for macOS, not iOS. When I searched for iOS pasteboard site:help.apple.com I got zero results, while searching for iOS clipboard site:help.apple.com got many hits, all of which suggests that Apple doesn't use the term "pasteboard" when addressing users (even though UIPasteboard is the name of the internal API).

Another data point is that the Simulator has a menu command Edit / Automatically Sync Pasteboard although (speculation!) maybe that's meant to be understood by developers not end-users?

I've got a similar problem in that I'm trying to display an error message if the pasteboard contents are "invalid" in the current situation. (In the app, there is a main tweet which has already been loaded in the main part of the window, but I also want to let the user select a second tweet if they've copied a Twitter URL to the pasteboard.) I want to say something like The tweet on the pasteboard could not be downloaded but I assume most users won't know what a "pasteboard" is, and even changing it to The tweet on the clipboard could not be downloaded isn't great IMHO. Removing the on the pasteboard/clipboard phrase is not an option because The tweet could not be downloaded won't work since it sounds like it applies to the main tweet already loaded in the main part of the window, not the tweet on the pasteboard. I could remove the message entirely, but then the user wouldn't know if they successfully copied an invalid link to the pasteboard; they could keep retrying because they think the copy-to-pasteboard failed, not the download-from-twitter failed.

Update 2019-07-20: I wanted to document how Google Chrome does it, because it seems like a good solution. When you tap into the search box to start typing a URL, it provides an extra option immediately below it saying "Link You Copied" followed by the link. I like this because "You Copied" aligns with the action the user took ("Copy") and avoids the whole issue of using "pasteboard" or "clipboard".

Answer 4

Looking at the human interface guidelines, there is a picture of app showing a pop up menu with an option for Copy. So simply say Copy and do not mention pasteboard or clipboard

https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/interaction/3d-touch/