A minor annoyance with pasting my Mac's paste buffer into Free42 on my iPhone

[MickM]

I want to copy a 42S program from a text editor on my Mac into Free42 on my iPhone. On my Mac I select the text and do a Copy. Then on the phone I GTO .. and go into program mode. I then tap on the screen and select Paste and I get a dialog box asking for permission to paste from the Mac, however before I can tap on OK to do that the dialog box goes away. I then have to select Paste a second time and only then does the dialog box persist so that I can approve the paste operation. After that I can paste the same stuff as many times as I want, but if I copy different text on the Mac and try to paste it into the iPhone again then I need to approve the paste once more and it takes another 2 attempts to make that happen.

[Thomas Okken]

https://thomasokken.com/free42/#ios-paste

[MickM]

Thanks - I'll definitely do that. However, with the setting I had in place (i.e. Ask to paste) should it still behave the way I'm seeing i.e. a momentary dialog box requiring the paste operation be done again? Obviously with my setting now changed I won't run into this again...

On Tuesday, December 5, 2023 at 5:12:21 PM UTC-5 Thomas Okken wrote:

https://thomasokken.com/free42/#ios-paste

[Thomas Okken]

A "momentary dialog box" is not something I'm familiar with. You get a dialog, you click OK, and the Paste happens. I put up with that for quite a while before I got annoyed enough to look for a solution, and I never once saw it do what you describe. Are you sure you're not just mis-hitting the button?

[Thomas Okken]

Or touching the screen anywhere outside of the dialog, I think that has the same effect as hitting Cancel...

[MickM]

Each time I copy something new on the Mac and then try to paste it into the calculator (with the preferences set for Ask) I get the behavior shown in the video.

[Thomas Okken]

Huh! That is odd.

I agree that it doesn't look like you're doing anything wrong, but I am unable to reproduce this on my phone.

Then again, I don't think I've tried that exact scenario myself. When you said you were pasting something from your Mac, I assumed you meant via email or something, but this looks like there's some kind of direct clipboard transfer going on. I'll have to try that. How do you make that happen?

[Thomas Okken]

Just to make sure that this is not an OS bug, could you try pasting into Chrome? When you tap on its URL field, there is an option "Text You Copied," and that brings up the same dialog.

[MickM]

I'm selecting text from within a text editor (I've tried both TextEdit and Sublime Text) on my Mac and pasting into Plus42 on the phone. I tried pasting into Chrome as you suggested - it worked without issue i.e. the dialog box came up and persisted until I had made my selection. 

Interestingly, I looked into the Free42 settings and I did not see the preference for what to do when pasting (I don't think I've actually run Free42 since installing the last update). I tried pasting into Free42 and it had the same behavior as Plus42 (which is consistent with earlier observations). After doing my first paste into the newly installed Free42 version I went back into its preferences and then I did see a new preference setting for paste options similar to that in Plus42. Not sure if that's a useful clue or not.

[Thomas Okken]

I'm selecting text from within a text editor (I've tried both TextEdit and Sublime Text) on my Mac and pasting into Plus42 on the phone. I tried pasting into Chrome as you suggested - it worked without issue i.e. the dialog box came up and persisted until I had made my selection. 

OK, I'll have to try to reproduce the issue on my phone, then.

What did you do to set things up to be able to transfer the clipboard from the Mac to the iPhone? I haven't used that functionality myself so I'm not familiar with the process.

 

Interestingly, I looked into the Free42 settings and I did not see the preference for what to do when pasting (I don't think I've actually run Free42 since installing the last update). I tried pasting into Free42 and it had the same behavior as Plus42 (which is consistent with earlier observations). After doing my first paste into the newly installed Free42 version I went back into its preferences and then I did see a new preference setting for paste options similar to that in Plus42. Not sure if that's a useful clue or not.

It looks like the setting only appears after the OS has noticed that the app is trying to do this kind of pasting. That's interesting, but I'm afraid it's not a useful clue when it comes to the issue of the dialog box disappearing. But who knows, I'll have to reproduce the issue before I can say for sure.

[MickM]

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/copy-and-paste-between-devices-mchl70368996/mac

[Thomas Okken]

OK, thanks! I'll look into this tomorrow.