Silence is golden, especially for Pastebot

Pastebot, the powerful clipboard manager application, was going to become a whole lot better with the release of iOS4 and multitasking. Or so we thought. The application, developed by Tapbots, allows you to copy from other applications like Safari or Mail and have an entire history of your copies in a clipboard, exportable to Mac, right from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The only qualm was that you had to open the application every time you wanted your clip to be saved. Hence, multitasking could have been a dream come true for advocates of the clipboard application.

"Our dreams of an ideal Pastebot were crumbling away as we heard the limitations of [multitasking in iOS4]" wrote Mark Jardine, designer of the application. "Apple had not provided a way to let Pastebot run in the background." With disappointed customers and dissatisfied team members, Tapbots had to start thinking of an out-of-the-ordinary solution. They almost had it.

"Paul came up with an idea that would actually allow Pastebot to run in the background" Mark continues. "The idea is to have a silent audio clip play in the background. This would use one of Apple’s backgrounding APIs that allows music to play in the background. Turns out it works flawlessly." In short, using the iPod's background play feature allowed beta testers to reap the full benefits of Pastebot without having to reload the application. But after a week of waiting for a response from Apple, the update was denied as it altered the way a background process was meant to be run.

Today, the solution is here. Within the aforementioned rejection letter, Apple wrote that the application could be approved if actual music was played in the background. So that's exactly what the developers did, by integrating the iPod application into Pastebot, thus allowing you to choose a song to listen to. "Having a song playing in the background while Pastebot runs in the background isn’t ideal" says Mark, "but nothing is stopping the user from putting their device on mute or better yet, using a silent audio clip of their own." The application is due to be re-submitted in the very near future.

Humorously, Tapbots link you to a certain CNET article that explains how there are some artists who sell the sound of silence. For Pastebot, silence really is golden.

Read our review of Pastebot here. Interested in other Tapbots applications? Read our reviews of Calcbot and Convertbot too.

[Quotes courtesy of Tapbots]