I’ve tried countless clipboard managers, though most of them are useful, but all of them have one or two things in common, they’re either “obtrusive” or have a high memory footprint. What I meant by obtrusive is that they cannot be hidden completely, letting you only hide the clipboard at the left/right/top/bottom of your screen with a little bit of the app jutting out of the screen, visible to the eye. That’s not very elegant.

Stuf (£12.99), written by The Escapers is simple and gets the job done. Utilizing Leopard’s new Heads Up Display technology, also known as the HUD, not only does the user interface look like part of your Mac, it’s also easy on your system’s memory resources which is an important aspect especially if you have many programs open at the same time and already eating up lots of system resources.

Clipboard managers are useful if you find yourself copying text, images or both, and needing them all over again just to realise that you’ve over-written your clipboard with a newly copied item. As a web developer I find that this is a very useful tool to boost my productivity as I’m dealing with codes and snippets everyday.

Stuf User Interface

This is the HUD window and this is all there is to the app other than the preferences window. I’ve set the background of the HUD window to white for my liking, of course you can change the text and background to whatever color you want via the preference window:

You can also create multiple clipboards so that you can store certain snippets that you might want to use in future.

Bring up Stuf via Hotkey

What is vital for every clipboard manager is that it has to be hidden from view when you don’t need it but lets you call up the app easily via a hotkey when you do. From the preference window, you can set your own custom hot key. I set it to “alt + S” in this instance. “S” stands for Stuf, so it’s easy to remember.

Clipboard Sharing

If you have multiple Macs and would like to have a synchronized set of clipboard items, this feature is nifty.

To conclude, Stuf succeeds in both form and function, although it lacks the option of pasting unformatted text which I find very useful in other clipboard manager programs. To counter this, I’ll share with you a simple and quickest way to paste unformatted text in the next coming post.

Stay tuned!

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I have been using PTH Pasteboard for a while before I finally ditched it for this – Clipboard Evolved ($15).

If you like to keep copies of stuff that you copied so that you can use it later, you’ll love this app. I have found clipboard apps a huge help in my programming work and my daily computing.

There’re many things to like about Clipboard Evolved, mainly it’s cool animation effects, hence the title of this post. The way the app works is very intuitive, using a hotkey, show it when you need it and hide it when you don’t.

Clipboard Evolved utilizes the menu bar to perform most functions (other than a hotkey). Like many other similar apps, the clipboard can copy a whole bunch of stuff, like text, colors, images and files.

Main Clipboard’s Interface

The interface looks almost like a real physical clipboard, nothing wrong about the design there, but personally if the interface could look like a regular HUD (Heads Up Display), I think it will look better as the look will tie in perfectly with your Mac’s look and feel. But if you don’t like the default color of the clipboard, you are able customize it to your heart’s content.

You can also view all your clipboard history via the menu bar which looks like this:

There is also the grid view if you prefer (this view looks like if you copy lots of pictures in your computing life you’ll appreciate this):

Finally there is the dock view, you can either put your clipboard on the left or right of your screen with this option. Choose “auto-hide” to keep the clipboard out of view when you don’t need it much like how you would auto hide the dock.

Clipboard Animation

One thing I must highlight here is the effort put into developing the animation for the summoning of the clipboard. The animation looks amazing I must say and there are many you can choose from.

Multiple Clipboards

With multiple clipboards, you can assign one for work, one for play or any other category deem appropriate.

Drag and Drop

There are many ways you can retrieve an item from your clipboard’s list. You can copy from the board, set an option to “double click to copy”, or “double click to paste into an active app” etc. One neat way is to use drag an item from the clipboard and into any application you want that item to be pasted into. On the reverse, you can also drag anything (text, image, files) into the menubar icon and the clipboard will open to let you drop it into any container.

Global Hot Keys

Assign hot keys to do the most important thing like invoking your clipboard among other stuff.

Gripes

One thing that is really annoying, is that the latest copied items are at the bottom. Meaning I have to scroll all the way downwards to find that recently copied item. Also, when the clipboard is full, you can’t store anymore items. Unless you click a checkbox that says “Rollover History”, which means old items are replaced by the new ones. So for instance if your clipboard is full, the latest item will replace the top most item, and subsequently the second, third, fourth and so on. One problem with this is that it’s hard to find the latest copied item as the last copied item will be buried in between old and new items. I hope the developer fixes this.

Other than that, a potential clipboard app, the animation appeals to me the most.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: