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Written by Tom Mordasky
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Tuesday, 03 October 2006 |
Sweet multi-tasking tool
 Since time immemorial, the lowly clipboard has lived quietly in the background, saving countless hours of typing and dragging and dropping. With the evolution of OS X, the clipboard has become more robust, extending its dominion to include files and folders. Though it can now hold many more types of items than ever before, it still only stores one item at a time. If only a race of super machines would find the clipboard and vastly enhance its abilities, like Vger from the original Star Trek Movie. Go forth little clipboard, and hold as many items as you like!
Now, while there is no shortage of software to enhance the clipboards abilities, some are more noteworthy than others. This installment of dotAPP will look at Inventive’s iClip, to see how it stacks up.
iClip is distributed as shareware, with a registration fee of $19.95. Its somewhat unoriginal name hides an excellent feature set. Its dock-like interface is at once familiar and easy to use. Its window can be anchored along any screen edge and is summoned either by clicking on its optional menu bar icon or via mouse over. Items load into the bins in their order of being copied, either newest or oldest first, as the user prefers. It can hold any clipping or file that can be copied by the finder. Holding the curser over an item will provide a larger preview of the bin’s contents. iClip’s storage capacity is limited only by the number of available bins in its window. Simply click on the plus and minus buttons to add and delete slots at will. There does not seem to be a limit to the number of potential bins.
In addition to the individual bins, iClip supports clipboard sets. Groups of commonly used items can be organized and
stored for continual reuse. Any user of the various page layout programs (Quark, InDesign etc) is familiar with libraries and will know just how useful these sets can be. Particularly, considering they are system spanning rather than app specific.
iClip supports numerous user definable hot keys and one-click options for streamlining management and use of its contents. Users can drag items into and out of the bins as well as copy and paste with a single click. Items can be preferenced to move back and forth from the clipboard manually or automatically. Text clipping can be edited directly within the clipping bins (Though it will loose any app specific formatting). Contents of the various sets and bins are stored in the app’s preference file, meaning they will still be there after a restart or crash.
For the widget fans, there is also iClip Lite. Both snazzy and free, don’t let the "lite" fool you. It packs the key features of its stand-alone sibling and wraps it into a cool widget style interface. Unlike its big brother, it features only a single set of clippings, though the single set can hold as many items as the user desires. Items can be added manually via the arrows on each bin or automatically by activating the record mode. While its interface is gorgeous, it suffers slightly from the fact that dashboard must be summoned before one can gain access its contents.
Overall both iClip and iClip Lite are simple to use and are extremely handy little apps. It could easily become a must have for graphic and web artists as well as anyone who finds themselves continually needing its toolbox style interface.
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The Good: Simple and effective way to expand the clipboard’s abilities.
The Bad: Edited text loses its formatting. Lite version is tied to dashboard.
The Skinny: A must have for any multi-tasker. Why doesn't Tiger have this built in?
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