GTD Wannabe

My Take on ClipMate 6.5

I’ve received a request from Jim:

I see you mentioned Clipmate, as I think you did once before. Your software reviews are so thoughtful. Can you write up some of your thoughts around Clipmate? I have been looking into demoing it, but since it is buy-ware, I’m hesitant to pull the trigger unless there is some proven utility over EN’s Universal Clipper. Itseems very developed and feature rich, but are all those things very useful. What’s the story say you?

Interesting question Jim, glad you asked. Here are my two cents on ClipMate. Keep in mind that anything I say here is influenced by the fact that I’ve been using ClipMate for years and it is firmly ingrained into my system. These items are in no particular order:

Long on Functionality, Short on Looks

It’s ugly. Forgive me, but it’s true. The UI is old and ugly. So ugly that I’m occasionally tempted to replace it with something pretty, web 2.0-y, ajaxy, or anything that wasn’t so damned ugly.

Keep Everything You’ve Ever Copied

• It lets me keep a gazillion clips. Copied something yesterday, like a URL, path, chunk of text, image? Zip through Clipmate to find it and use it again. I cannot tell you how often this has saved my bacon when some other program goes belly up before I can save. Actually, when I’m on a typing roll, I’ll often just copy something I’m working on, say in Blogger, just in case something goes bad.
• I don’t know if you can actually keep everything; I tell Clipmate to just keep the last week’s stuff.
• There’s even a backup functionality, to backup your clipmate database. I don’t bother.
• In addition, you can organize your clips into folders. There’s also something called a “safe”, which lets you have clips that you can’t accidentally delete. I thinking that you could put sensitive things there. I was using the safe for keeping html tables for use with EverNote, but I lost them on a computer refresh and haven’t bothered putting them back.

Hot Hot Hot

It lets me assign a hotkey for “regions screen capture”. As soon as I hit F11 (or whatever key combination you like), I get a cross-hairs on my primary monitor, which I use to select a rectangle. That clip gets tucked into Clipmate, for pasting now, or later. I wish it would let me use the crosshairs on my secondary monitor too, but the Universal Clipper doesn’t either, so maybe it’s got something to do with the deeper meaning of screen clipping.

Use the Magic Hat to Clean Up

The magic hat is an icon that lets me clean up text. For example, let’s say I copy something out of a forwarded forwarded forwarded email. You know, the ones with all the > or | marks at the beginning of each line? Well, Clipmate will let you clean up garbage like that in text. Here’s a look at the options you can play with for cleaning up text:

Export, eh

It lets me export clips. For example, let’s say I take a bunch of screenshots for a particular blog post. In the Clipmate Explorer, I select the appropriate items, then export them. Each clip gets to be its own jpg. I could also export text clips, but I’ve never found that particularly useful.

Miscellaneous Functionality That I Do Use

• Something called Power Paste is pretty cool. Turn it on, then you can paste a bunch of things from the list, one after the other.
• There’s also the ability to glue clips together.
• Spellcheck when you’re looking at text. In fact, you can clip text, then edit it, before pasting it somewhere else.
• You can print clips, excellent for keeping track of screenshots of settings, etc. You can format the header/footer, etc. of the clip

Everything And the Kitchen Sink

The problem I see with clipmate, besides the fact that I think it’s ugly, is that there is just too much functionality. It tries to be (and does, very well, I think) everything to everbody. I figure I only use something like 25% of its feature set. It can be a little daunting to look at when you first open it. For example, I’ve never been able to figure out the difference between Clipmate Classic view and Clipmate Explorer, except that I prefer the latter. But I don’t know what the former is for. I definitely don’t use half of the menu commands.

My Recommendation?

There are other clipboard tools out there. There are other screenshot capturing tools out there (SnagIt anyone?). There’s even the new Universal Clipper for EverNote users. You need to think about what kind of functionality you need.

A few months ago, I looked around for other clipping tools, in the open source area. I tried out a few that seemed to do some things, but nothing did everything that Clipmate would do for me. I can’t remember which one feature ClipMate had that nobody else beat, but it was either the hotkey screen region capture, or the clean up text, or the export to file, or the printing. Well, you get the idea. I was willing to pay for ClipMate because I *need* to have these functionalities. (This is also why I won’t switch to the Universal Clipper, because it only does the one thing, not the rest).

So, think about what you need from a clipping utility. If your list matches up with my list above, then ClipMate is for you. If you need less functionality, then you might be able to get away with a freer application.