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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.
Archive your pasteboard using Flycut
I often find myself wishing that I could retrieve something that I had cut or copied earlier in the day, or maybe even longer ago than that. So I decided to make an archive of my pasteboard, and store it on Dropbox so I can easily retrieve something later. There are lots of programs out there which will offer to save your pasteboard or do all sorts of complicated things with it. I was looking for something simple, and I found just what I wanted in Flycut, a free program based on an older app called Jumpcut which hasn't been updated since January 2009. Configure Flycut Flycut is available for free from the Mac App Store and requires OS X 10.6.6 or later. After downloading it, launch it and set the preferences as shown here: You can set it to "Remember" anywhere from 10 to 99 entries, and display five to 99. Set those to whatever you like. The most important part is to make sure that you choose "After each clip" for the "save" frequency. Everything else relies on that setting being correct. Download and install a shell script flycutmonitor.sh is a shell script which automatically saves your pasteboard to a file anytime the pasteboard changes. Download it, make sure it is executable (chmod 755 flycutmonitor.sh) and move it to /usr/local/bin/flycutmonitor.sh. By default, your clipboard will be saved to ~/Dropbox/TEMP/flycutmonitor.sh/. If you want to change that, edit the DIR= line in flycutmonitor.sh. The folder will be created if needed. Also, if growlnotify is installed, the script will show the current clipboard via Growl whenever it changes. If you do not want Growl notifications, set GROWL=no in flycutmonitor.sh (look in the file, you'll see where to make the change). Last but not least: launchd Download com.tjluoma.flycutmonitor.plist and copy it to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. Edit the line which begins with /Users/luomat/Library/ and change luomat to whatever your username is on your Mac. (If you do not do this, nothing will work.) run launchctl load com.tjluoma.flycutmonitor.plist or log out and then back in. To test it, simply cut or copy some text You should see a new file created in the folder that you specified, and a Growl notification should appear, unless Growl is not installed or disabled. One final note: I do not recommend having Flycut save its settings to Dropbox, but if you do change that, be sure to change the appropriate line in the com.tjluoma.flycutmonitor.plist file from: ~/Library/Application Support/Flycut/com.generalarcade.flycut.plist to ~/Dropbox/Preferences/com.generalarcade.flycut.plist where ~ is the full path to your home directory. (Do not use a literal ~ in this case, it will not work.)
