Product Reviews

The first thing you'll notice about iClip (and one thing that separates it from most clipboard apps) is that it's been given a hefty lick of paint with the eye candy brush. No minimalist bezels or tucked-away tabs at the side of the screen for this app. iClip demands your attention by taking up a huge chunk of screen space with a Dock-like panel containing a row of circular (or square) bins. These are your spaces for storing stuff, the idea being that you drag almost anything into any bin, whenever you fancy.

The iClip panel stays out of the way until you either mouse towards it or hit a key combination of your choice to bring it forward. By default, you get four sets of eight bins to choose from, and you can add more sets if you wish. For the more organised user, having one set of bins for images, another for text, and another for URLs might be an efficient way of working.

Each bin has an obvious In and Out control, as well as a central Actions button. This last is nicely made, as it offers different actions based on the contents of the bin.

iClip is pretty smart, too. Drag in an image from your desktop and you see just the image in the iClip bin. Drag an image from a web page, and it stores both the image and its original URL.

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Clicking the Action button on this item gives you options to remove either the picture or the URL portion of that clip, as well as opening the URL in your browser. It handles text, images and PDFs well, but other files can't be stored inside iClip itself. For everything else, it will offer to store an alias to the original file.

As well as dragging stuff in, iClip keeps an eye on your system clipboard and automatically imports everything you copy using good-old command-C, storing these clippings in a special set called the Recorder. Hover your mouse over any bin to preview its contents.

Be warned, though, that the Recorder isn't infinite. You can add more bins to it - so many that iClip will display a horizontal scrollbar so that you can reach them - but at this point the usefulness of the thing starts to get swamped by the interface. If you have only eight available Recorder bins, and fill one with a new clipping, your oldest clipping will disappear, rather than being automatically shifted to a new bin. It would be nice to have a preference setting allowing you to specify a maximum number of Recorder clips.

It's undoubtedly useful to have iClip around, especially if you're in the habit of copying text frequently to move it around. The visual previews in each bin are attractive and make finding the right clip much easier, and writers will appreciate the 'Copy text from all bins' command.

That said, the eye candy feels just a little bit overdone, and there's a bit too much emphasis on mousing to find what you need. Reaching a clipping stored in one of your later sets requires more clicks than feels comfortable. A keyboard shortcut for switching between clip sets would be an invaluable addition. For roughly £15, it's not bad value, but some might prefer a clipboard helper that's less visually intrusive.