AppFlow

Re-inventing the Clipboard: Clips

The clipboard is one of those features of any computer that we take for granted.  You use it every day, likely more than once.  The ⌘-C and ⌘-V are now among the most used key combinations on all computers world wide.  These are quite amazing statistics, but beg one interesting question:

Why hasn’t the clipboard ever been developed?  For example, you can only copy one thing to the clipboard, you can’t save things that you copy to it, and there is no safeguard, meaning that if you copy something else, your previous copied item is lost.

Clips

Clips addresses these problems in a very neat little app that is both user friendly, and extremely powerful!

Interface

This section is slightly more difficult than most other apps – for the simple reason that clips has three interfaces!  This means that the app is likely to fit your way of working (or at least, one of it’s interfaces will!  All of the interfaces are accessed by a key combination which is fully customisable.

The Board

As the name implies, Clips lets you copy multiple items and paste any of them anywhere on your system.  One of the two ways of doing this is through the ‘clipboard’.

There are three different layout styles that you can choose for your clipboard.  You can have your clips arranged in a neat, uniform grid arrangement, in a total mish-mash with no uniformity at all, or in a rather pleasing circular arrangement as shown above.  My favourites have to be the latter two of the three, but there’s surely an arrangement for everyone.

When activated, either by pressing the key combination you allocate at start-up, or using an allocated hot-corner, the board covers the whole screen, much like the dashboard.  The side bar allows you to view just clips from one application, one space, one custom clipboard or from your library (more on the latter two later).

The Panel

If you don’t like the sound of a borad covering your entire screen, maybe the panel is for you.  This little clipboard companion sits at the side of your screen (or anywhere else you choose to place it).  It displays your most recent clips and can be easily resized to display more (or less) of your recent clips.

To paste a clip into a document, or anywhere on your computer, simply reach over to the panel, and click the desired clip.  Every time you use the ⌘-C keyboard shortcut, your new clip is added to the bottom of this list.

The panel also serves another use when it comes to creating clips.  To copy a file, folder or image in finder, an image on the web, or even a clump of text, simply drag it to the panel.  This opens the ‘dropped’ tab where you can see all of the clips you have created in this way.

Control Panel

The control panel is the final part of the Clips interface.  It is also accessed by a user defined key combination.

Like with the board, the control panel has a left hand sidebar with options to view and paste clips from just one application, space or custom clipboard.  You can also access your dropped clips by pressing the button under ‘library’.

Clips are displayed in a cover flow, and can be pasted simply by dragging it into the desired destination.

Custom Clipboards

Whilst in the control panel, you can create custom clipboards by clicking the ‘+’ icon in the bottom left.  Custom clipboards can be accessed from the control panel, or the board and contain just the clips you put in them.  This is very useful for saving a set of web addresses in one easy to get to place.

Click the Clip!

Double clicking a clip brings up a rather nice settings panel with lots of different options for pasting your clip quickly.  These include setting up an abbreviation.  Typing abbreviations replaces them with the clip assigned to them  This works system wide.

You can also set a keyboard shortcut exclusively for that clip, or ‘flag’ the clip so that it will appear in the ‘flagged’ tab of the panel.

Conclusion

Clips takes the clipboard to a new level and beyond.  It’s quick to learn, easy to use and extremely powerful!  Sure, there are some things about it that I don’t like, such as the lack of a scroll bar in the panel and the fact that the control panel isn’t effected by exposé or show desktop, but these are only small niggles.

Overall this app does all that it was designed to do and more.  It should definitely earn a place on your mac, and once you’ve used it for a while, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!

Clips 1.x requires Mac OS X 10.5, costs €19.99 (£17.99) and a 15 day free trial is available.  It is made by ‘Conceited Software‘.