« Online Postage | Main | Precocious Child Genius This Way »
March 23, 2007
iClip 4
This is a shameless marketing gimmick, but I haven't written about iClip before, so I will now. MacZot are dropping the price of iClip today by a dime for every review of iClip posted -- until it's free. I got it as part of some previous maczotty type extravaganza -- I started using iClip 3, and then upgraded to iClip 4 as part of MacHeist. I've been using it daily ever since.
You can see from my history of using iClip that it is very linked into the MacZot way of doing things; clever marketing, small shiny apps. But is it worth your money? Well, if you get it later today via MacZot, it will surely be pretty cheap.
It's an enhanced clipboard. Very beautiful, copies in loads of different sorts of clipboard content. It works in two different ways, and I use it for both. First, there's a clipboard recorder. The recorder keeps hold of the last so many things you've copied to clipboard -- how many is configurable. So that saves your bacon if you're holding something in clipboard and then accidentally copy something else.
The second is that you can configure sets of clippings separately. I keep separate set of clips for text that I regularly want to paste into things. This is mostly boilerplate answers to common eBay questions, text I send to people who've bought books from me, that sort of thing. But I also keep my credit card number in a clip. Yes, I do know this isn't very secure, but it's dead handy. I know there are much more elaborate ways to do this using dedicated programs and keyboard shortcuts, but I am a click on the bunny sort of girl and iClip works for me.
You can see from the screenshot that iClip is very beautiful, and also that sometimes that beauty could theoretically get in the way of efficiency. You can choose to have the clips in slightly less pretty but more practical square boxes instead, and you can see the full content of a clip by mousing over it. You can also choose where on the screen it sits, and whether it seamlessly hides away. I keep it on the right hand side of my widescreen monitor and autohide it. So when I want it I just have to go and get it.
Even if you don't decide to buy the main program, there's a widget version of iClip that is free, iClip lite, and that has won loads of 'best widget' awards. Go check it out. It doesn't have as many features as the main program, but it's very well worth having for nothing. It requires Mac OS X 10.4
I should say that I also use another clipboard application, Spike, from Porchdog. It's much less pretty and I don't think it has so many neat features, but it carries my clipboard across all my networked computers, both Mac and PC. That's very cool and I don't know any other way to do it.
Update: I won a prize from MacZot for 'best iClip screenshot' in their ReviewZot, so I've won various free software licenses. Including the license for iClip, which as you will remember I already own. So first person to ask can have it.
Posted by Alison Scott at March 23, 2007 01:39 PM
Comments
Thank you so much for that last little bit of your review. I've been saying I was going to write a utility that synced the clipboards of my mac's and PCs because I've been using both of them at the same time recently on my dual-monitors (I really need to upgrade from my mac mini that doesn't easily do dual screens).
Posted by: Devin at March 26, 2007 11:14 PM
May I have your extra iclip 4 license. Thank you for your time!
Posted by: Salim Sweiss at April 10, 2007 12:50 AM