Copy and paste and copy and paste…
As a web designer it can get pretty tedious, especially if you’re like me and keep an extensive library of code clips and snippets that you like to use to build your projects. No matter what industry you’re in mind you, I am certain you’re familiar with this repetitive operation. It kills me to say this, but Microsoft had this right when they brought this into their Office products, but the trouble there was that it annoyed me more than helped me. For starters, 9 identical icons sitting on a clipboard doesn’t tell me much about what those clips contain.
Anyhoodle, the ability to effectively manage clips and snippets has been sorely missing from most OS’s I’ve used in my geeky career, and I have resorted to a number of embarrassing techniques over the years to compensate (which we have no need to get into here). Along came Macheist… remember that?. I’m all for a good cause and a good bargain so I hopped right on and bought into the hype. Some of the stuff in the bundle is frivolous, some of it I am still trying to find a use for, some of it is downright powerful beyond all description… and then there is iClip.
iClip is one of those apps that shouldn’t be an app; it should be part of the OS. iClip is a brilliant nonintrusive tool that, similarly to your dock, pops in and out when needed to paste in any number of things you’ve recently copied or cut. It just quietly keeps a sequential running tab of your clipping activity in a library or “clip set”. The best part is, you can actually see what’s in those clips, taking the guess work out of the pasting process.
Here’s the real power of iClip… clip sets. Remember those code libraries I constantly pull from? Well instead of pulling them out of excel (which is how I have been managing them as of late), I have added each set of related snippets into a “clip set”. I can quickly switch from clip set to slip set with a hot key and quickly access all the snippets in my library without digging through files and folders. You can also name your individual clips. In my case, many of my oft used snippets are long strings of html code, so naming those clips and displaying their name in in the clip window as opposed to their actual contents makes finding the right one more fail safe.
For more information about this butt whipping speed tool, visit inventive.us.
[tags]iClip, Macheist, Microsoft, web designer[/tags]
May 13th, 2009 at 9:27 am
[...] in the spring of 2007 I wrote about iClip as one possible solution and in fact my dependency on it around that time became so great that I was using it to store [...]