Steff.me

I’ve been using the beta version of iClip 4 for a few days now and I honestly don’t see the advantage. To me, it’s just one of those applications that I have installed thinking it will benefit me. I let it run in the background, thinking “Right, cool, if I copy a few things I can just paste them later”. Well, that’s not going to happen.

It’s not iClip’s fault that it doesn’t, though! iClip works perfectly well and, I assume, as intended. It’s feature list, which I delve into in a moment, seems solid and complete and it does look pretty slick. My problem is that I forget about it. I copy something and I instantly paste it somewhere else - it’s why I’m copying it. Sure, if I wanted to copy multiple items on a page it would save me time flicking back and forth maybe but then I’d have to have this chunky, more style than substance application running on the side of my screen.

It does have some nice features. If you can put up with or, indeed, like iClip’s looks I’m sure you’ll find a benefit for it. For example, you can group your clippings. Say you just want to store some little notes that you gather from websites while writing a review, a blog article or an essay you could create a ‘clip set’ named “Essay Clips”.

When you switch to that set, you’ll be able to copy and paste to your hearts content with all the clippings being stored all in this one set. Later on, when you go to write your essay or whatever, you can retrieve them and go about your work.

Please note, to store something in a particular clip set bin, you have to go to iClip and press the button with an arrow pointing in to the bin. You can’t just press Cmd + C, as that will save it to the “Recorder” clipboard. You can actually add a Hot Key in the iClip preferences which will allow you to copy and paste to and from iClip. That way you just press your iClip copy button to copy some clipping to a particular bin.

As I said, if you don’t select a particular set to save it to, it will automatically get stored to the “Recorder” clip set. This is basically an instant history of all your copy/paste activity, so if you haven’t said to store something to a particular bin, it will be saved to here.

It does, of course, have the standard functions you’d expect to see. You can add new sets, add more bins (to a maximum of 99 per set), manage your sets and bins allowing you to change names and so forth and of course delete and clear your clippings. Just in case you’re not clear by now, a bin is somewhere you store a clipping and these bins can be organized in to sets. You can also customize some of the look and feel of iClip. For example, if you don’t like the default large circular bins, you can change them to smaller ones or even square bins. You can also adjust it’s transparency (which I’m sure it learnt from the uproar over Disco). Other things include Hot Keys to allow you to edit iClip’s copy and paste (as mentioned earlier) and to show and hide iClip from view. That’s iClip in a nutshell.

I’ve tried the earlier versions of iClip and I was never too impressed with it. I’m not a fan of having an application open if I don’t make full use of it. iClip just seems more of a novelty application than something that will save me time and effort. It seems like way more effort is taken in to organizing these clippings than it would be to copy and paste the information I need right there, right then when I find it. If I want to store some information for use later, I’ll paste it in to TextMate (which is running more often than not) and deal with it when I need to. This version of iClip just adds more style to an application I was never going to use.

I would only use this application if I could leave it open constantly so I won’t forget it was running, however having something hovering over everything I’m doing really does bother me. Even though I have it Hot Keyed so that I can press F6 to show and hide it, it doesn’t look very nice when it opens and I don’t have too much use for it when it is open. Sorry, iClip, you’re not for me. I would suggest to everyone reading this that you do take iClip for a spin, as I’m sure some of you would find a use for it. I believe this version of iClip will be available around the same time as Macworld, which is January 8th to the 12th. Check it out, then.

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The clippings in “Essay Clips” are in fact from Glenn Wolsey’s blog, I just happened to be there at the time of writing this. Thank you to him.