Universal Clipboard Support

[Bryan Rieger]

I was really hoping to see Universal Clipboard support on macOS and iPadOS in v2. There's lots of times where I find myself working between two devices, and multiple apps, and being able to copy/paste to, and from the Affinity apps via the Universal Clipboard would be insanely helpful (and save massive amounts of time/frustration).

[MikeTO]

I don't think we're ever going to see it working as seamlessly as it does on device. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's anything app developers need to do to support Universal Clipboard, it just syncs public pasteboards automatically. When an app copies something to the clipboard (pasteboard), it often copies it in multiple formats. For example, it might copy plain text and rich text (formatted text) at the same time so an app that supports only plain text has something it can deal with. A complex app like Affinity needs to be able to copy data that other apps can't support such as text with pinned images that have adjustment layers applied so it copies the complex data to a private pasteboard that only it can access and a "dumbed down" version to the public pasteboard for other apps to use.

I'm no expert but I think that the Universal Clipboard feature syncs only public pasteboard data so even if Affinity had improved pasteboard handling you wouldn't want to copy complex content from one device to another because it would get dumbed down.

I did some tests and I think there is may be one bug and one design limitation that should be reviewed.

1. Copying text from Affinity on macOS copies text to the public.rtf and two public plain text pasteboards which is great. But while copying text from Affinity on iPadOS copies text to the same public plain text pasteboards, it copies a null value or something like that to the public.rtf pasteboard.
    
2. When I copied a vector shape or raster image from Affinity on macOS it was copied to the com.adobe.pdf pasteboard. This is nicer than the approach that other apps use when dumbing down complex data - many rasterize vectors and copy to public.png or public.tiff. But while this is a better approach on the device, I don't think the com.adobe.pdf pasteboard is synced with Universal Clipboard so there's nothing there for Affinity for iPadOS to paste. Perhaps it would be better if Affinity also copied data to public.tiff or png to provide something that is sync-able.

Cheers