Clips: A New Age of Clipboard Managers Has Come
Over the last few months, I have seen my fair share of new clipboard managers. Some of them are really just clipboard managers, but only one has really wowed me. This one has an amazing interface for handling clippings, but yet it is also extremely usable. It is Clips by Conceited Software.
The first thing that struck me about Clips is its beautiful interface. There are two main windows that you will be using, and both of them look great! The first one is called the Organizer. It has a CoverFlow view of all your clippings. It is exactly like the CoverFlow in the Finder; it has a list view on the bottom and the CoverFlow on the top. It has columns for date, application clipped from, and name. If you are running a slower computer (with Intel integrated GPU and a low amount of RAM), this is going to be the main window that you will be using. If you have a newer or faster computer, or if you’d rather not use the organizer, you’ll probably want to be using the Board.
The Board definitely fits its name; it looks a lot like the Dashboard. When you enter it, your screen darkens, and you will see a lot of floating rectangles. These rectangles are clippings. If you hover over one of them, it will pop out at you so you can read it. There are three views for the board: Circle View, Column View, and Messy View. In Circle View, all of your clippings will form a nice circle; the more clippings, the more cluttered it may look. In Column View, your clippings are displayed in as many columns as can fit on your screen. And in Messy View, clippings can be moved by you, and are basically just randomly spread out. If you have a lot of clippings, you are going to want to use Messy View.
Whichever window you use, you get a sidebar. In this sidebar, you can choose to only view clippings from certain apps, spaces, or clipboards. The built-in application sorting is great. I have never seen another clipboard manager that does this. It makes it so simple to find a clipping that you know you made in application X. The spaces support is also really fun. I have two spaces: one for work, and one for anything else. So, if I know that I copied something while I was working, I can just select that space in the sidebar. Now, clipboards — this really is where most of my refining comes from. You can create a smart clipboard that only looks for things with a certain name, application, space, creation date, and many more fields. Instead of having to constantly move things to a clipboard that you have created, they will be moved there as they are created if they fit the criteria of the smart clipboard. To create one (you have to be in the organizer) you just click on the wheel button in the lower-left-hand-corner. You will then be prompted with a dialogue that looks like any other smart folder creator. Then just enter the information, and it is completely set up! It’s that simple!
The best feature of clips is a feature that you never have to configure; it is already configured for you when you first use it. It is the clipboard monitoring. This monitors everything that you copy using Apple’s built-in clipboard, and automatically adds it to Clips’ library. It is setup to only have 15 monitored clippings in your library at one time, but you can change that by going to Clips,Preferences,General and changing the slider in the middle of the window. If you don’t want Clips to do any monitoring, just uncheck the checkbox labeled “Automatically create Clips from system clipboard.”
The feature that really pulls Clips ahead of the pack of clipboard managers is its abbreviations support. Abbreviations are exactly what they sound like: abbreviations. This brings features of an app like TextExpander or Typinator into a clipboard manager! To create a new abbreviation (in the organizer) right-click on a clipping and select “Assign Abbreviation.” Then, just type in the abbreviation that you want for that clipping and it’s set! It works system-wide!
Clips is one of those apps that tries to have itself in both of your spaces, but it does not work properly. Once the organizer is shown in a certain space, you can see it in both spaces, but when you try to select it in the other space (the one it was not created in), it won’t select! This can get extremely frustrating, but not enough so that it makes the experience of Clips bad; it is just a little flawed.
Clips by Conceited Software. is the prettiest and most feature-full clipboard manager I have seen in a while. It retails for $34.99 and you can pick up a trial from their site. The built-in abbreviations support more than compensates for its high price; compare the price to that of TextExpander, which only has abbreviations. I highly suggest that you try it, and tell us how you think it compares to other clipboard managers.
Installing this app immediately took over the ctrl-space hotkey, which is traditionally used for Quicksilver. I still haven’t found where in the settings to change the hotkey… Actually I haven’t been able to find the settings at all…
Follow up — found the settings — they just weren’t where I expected them to be. Very cool app otherwise.
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This monitors everything that you copy using Apple’s built-in clipboard, and automatically adds it to Clips’ library.
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This feature is exactly why I don’t like it ( or any similarly configured competitors ). At the end of the day I always have to perform a massive clean up. I’m perfectly happy with iClip, which only adds on demand …
That is a really cool app. One of the best in the field.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice app, but in the end of the day, i don’t need all this fancy stuff. It eats only my memory. Good looking, but not useful. Thats why i love Jumpcut.
@Peter: to disable automatic clipboard entries, simply select “Disable Clipboard Monitoring”. You can then add clips on-demand like you described…
Looks great, but this is just way too much stuff for such a simple need. You lost me at “two windows”.
I really wanted to like this app.
Unfortunately it is slow, doesn’t play nice with TextExpander (we’ll come back to that) and is expensive.
As for abbreviations vs TextExpander, that’s like comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari. Clips would not remember my abbreviations across restarts, you can’t really organise them, you can’t use delimiters or any of TE’s built-in logic (dates/shortcuts/commands/cursor etc).
Plus even if you turned off abbreviations it would not properly restore the clipboard when using TE.
This is an app that might be killer at version 2 but for the moment it’s verging on beta quality. Sorry!
@John: I agree, the abbreviations need some work, but, in the last few builds, TextExpander has been almost unusable for me; it crashes too much.
Really? I honestly don’t think TextExpander has ever crashed on me since I’ve been using it, which dates back to when it was Peter Maurer’s free TextPander.
The only problem I had was it forgetting some preferences, which was annoying but not terminal.
What does the developer say?
I have run into problems running many of these multiple clip board apps with TextExpander also. I have been begging the TextExpender developers to add this functionality right into their app. I am hopeful they may do it one day.
TextExpander is the holy grail for the Mac. I could not and will not live without it. By the way I run TextExpander on all five of my Macs and snippets are synced across them with MobileMe. I have never had it crash.
This app is definitely slick in the eye-candy category, but my new favorite clipboard manager is Stuf, over at theescapers.com. Doesn’t have the keyboard shortcuts of TextExpander, but it’s not really meant to be used in the same way. Just a simple clip organizer with network capabilities, and a few other tricks up its sleeve. I find that I actually use it throughout the day without it getting in the way.
But I must compliment the developers on how slick Clips looks! If they could only simplify it a bit.
Yep I bought Stuf in the recent MacZot promo, and really like it. Not perfect but it’s simple, clean and it does the job without pretension. Network shared clipboards are really handy.
[...] Jumpcut, with a beautiful animated interface. An in depth review of Clips by MacApper is available here. That being said, Clips retails for $30; Jumpcut for FREE. If you want to splurge on the beautiful [...]
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