The RIAA shut down Muxtape but that doesn’t mean its memory won’t linger on the hearts of those who must share their love of the Hold Steady with the world. Enter OpenTape, an open source package that essentially recreates the Muxtape experience on a personal level. You simply download the application, unpack it on your web server, and then upload songs. It took me about two minutes to set-up OpenTape on CrunchGear’s server [embed works below but the main page doesn't... checking with opentape on Twitter] and a few more minutes to upload music. Viola!

I actually applaud OpenTape for offering this tool. While it’s fairly basic, it creates hundreds, if not thousands, of targets for the RIAA and while they wrangle messily with poor Muxtape the concept will already be ubiquitous. Projects like these and OpenClip are cries for help – we want this functionality and we will take it by force if need be. Or maybe people just really like mixtapes.

For those of you who do not remember – or do not care to remember – OpenClip was supposed to be an open framework for implementing the Cocoa NSPasteboard functionality to the iPhone. While I’m thinking that if Apple wanted to implement copy/paste into the iPhone they would have done it already or will do it soon, OpenClip was a noble effort to work around the limitations of OS X on the iPhone.

As Herr Gruber pointed out, OpenClip used a loophole that made it possible for applications to read each other’s sandboxes, thereby creating a temporary repository for paste data. This, however, brings up a fairly big problem – in order to find pasted information, the “paster” has to search the home directories of each application in series and, besides, the 2.1 firmware will no longer allow that.

Apps that use OpenClip will no longer be able to copy and paste between applications. However, applications can still utilize a persistent way to store data inside the application, meaning that copy and paste within the app will still work fine. And on top of that, apps that utilize only one form (either copy or paste) can disable interface elements when Apple axes OpenClip.

So that’s the end of that. Clearly OpenClip was a cry for help rather than a viable tool. Apple knows we want cut and paste – even the abhorrent Windows Mobile has that little feature – and they’ll probably roll it out as soon as they damn well feel like it. It would also be swell if we had that background messaging platform they promised way back at WWDC but who are we to judge the whims of our overlords?

Shortly after releasing MagicPad, Proximi released a proposal video for a cross-application copy and paste system. This inspired a developer named Zac White to start OpenClip, a non-profit and open-source project aimed at putting as big of a dent in the app-to-app copy/paste problem as possible without breaking the rules of Apple’s SDK.

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