Review: iClipBoard 3
- Article 13 of 19
- MacUser, July 2010
It seems remarkable that more than 25 years since the Mac was first created, we still have only one clipboard. Copy to it, then copy something else and the clipboard gets wiped.
It’s no surprise that there are several alternative clipboard managers available now for OS X, including iClipboard. Offering unlimited clipboards, iClipboard is available through the services menu, contextual menus, hotkeys, the menubar and through a tray at the side of the screen. It captures any copy command, and the tray can also accept items through drag and drop. Each clipboard gets a preview icon as well as a “large preview” for mouseovers that displays information about the format, size, contents and date the clipboard was made. Each clipboard can be given a name, locked to prevent deletion or edited before it’s pasted.
There’s also “rapid” copy and paste. Using a hot key, you can copy information from several locations, then use another hot key to paste each of the different clipboards in order. This can prove useful if you’re copying from a columnar PDF within Preview, say, and want to copy and paste paragraphs in vertical rather than horizontal order without having to constantly switch between apps.
iClipboard also lets you organise your clippings into projects, and you can both move or, as of version 3.0, copy a clipping to a project so they can filter your collection. Unfortunately, there’s no way to exclude particular projects from a view, only display one project or all of them, but it’s a useful feature nevertheless.
Also new in version 3.0 is “Paste Blaster”, which is activated by a hotkey. Paste Blaster shows preview icons for your most recent clipboards in a manner similar to the Alt-Tab program switcher in OS X. Flick through Paste Blaster until you find the clipboard you want then select the clipboard and it will be pasted directly into the front-most application.
While it doesn’t have all the features of all the competitors – it doesn’t have PTHPasteboard Pro’s network syncing or filters, for example – of all the clipboard enhancement programs, iClipboard is probably the most fully featured. Indeed, it’s almost too fully featured, although thankfully you can switch off almost all the features you don’t want. The $30 price tag is slightly steep and if all you want is a clipboard archive, free alternatives such as Jumpcut are available. It also takes a little time to work out the interface and how all the functions work, and it lacks a way to “Paste and Match Style”. Nevertheless, if you do need a powerful clipboard manager, iClipboard is the app to get.