ClipboardEnhancement
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Collective for Mac retains your clipboard history, saves you time
Collective (US$1.99) is a clipboard history utility for Mac. It keeps track of everything you copy to your Mac's clipboard, which in turn allows you to paste different items without having to go back and forth copying and pasting over and over again. Since I've not used a clipboard utility app before, I know this frustration all too well! So when I got the opportunity to try out Collective, I jumped at it. To use Collective, copy items as you normally would to the clipboard, whether it be an image, file or text. When you come to paste an item, hit Shift + ⌘ + V instead of the usual ⌘ + V, the Collective window will appear with a history of all you've copied to the clipboard. Either click and drag what you want to paste or select it and press ⌘ + V. If you're pasting multiple items the click and drag technique will be the easiest and quickest. Of course, with copying so many things to the clipboard, Collective will soon become quite full, but Collective has some nifty features to help you keep on top of your clipboard. You can live search the Collective clipboard, filter items by the application they were copied from and Quick Look items directly from the clipboard. Collective also gives a thumbnail preview of non-text items. Furthermore, Collective copies text formatting but also lets you paste as plain text. Finally, Collective has Retina display support, is restart resistant (meaning if you restart your Mac all clipboard items will be saved) and supports apps running in full screen mode. Collective won't duplicate items you happen to copy more than once and you can blacklist Collective copying from certain apps, like password managers. Having spent the last few days using Collective, I'm really pleased with how it works. Aside from getting used to the new paste keyboard shortcut, Collective has been a pleasure to use and has improved my workflow. You can get Collective from the Mac App Store now, or why not try out some of these other trusted clipboard utilities recommended by the TUAW team: Flycut or Clyppan.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: CmdVees
The ability to copy and paste text is a staple of the modern OS. Even iOS can do it, but on the Mac, the default clipboard behavior can be a bit limiting at times. CmdVees is a US$4.99 ($0.99 when reviewed) Mac App Store utility that acts as an extension to the OS X clipboard, allowing sequential clippings instead of forcing one copy to overwrite the next. Say you want to copy three things from one app to another separately -- with the default Mac clipboard behavior, you'd have to swop between those two apps three separate times (once for each piece of text you want to copy over). CmdVees allows you to copy the three pieces of text sequentially, one after the other, and then paste those clippings back in the order that you copied them, or combine them into one clipping. Once each clipping has been pasted via Cmd+V, it's removed from the CmdVees clipboard, making it a quick, one-time copy and paste enhancement, which allows for rapid re-arrangement of text among many other previously tedious activities. If you need something else, including multiple pastes from one clipping, you can use Cmd+Shift+V or activate it from the CmdVees menu bar app, which allows you to see everything on your clipboard, the shortcuts for various functions, and pasting of items via a single click. You can also tell CmdVees to strip out formatting from text, which is incredibly handy if you happen to write for a living. We've previously covered another $0.99 tool from the MAS for similar uses, Clippy; there are also free alternatives (Jumpcut, ClipMenu), and the $2.99 but more sophisticated Clyppan along with its free, five-clippings-max sibling Clyppan Lite.
