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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.)
My favorite Mac apps: Giles' picks
Everyone else has had just three choice Mac apps, but I'm going to claim four because two of my choices live in the Menu Bar, and are therefore very small. Only you and I need to keep count, though, eh? Bean This marvelous little rich text editor is an excellent tool for writing to word counts, something I have to do very often. Bean packs in a lot of great features, and the developer is responsive to feedback and suggestions. Either TextMate or BBEdit When I'm not writing to word counts, I'm usually using Markdown to write for the web. Until last week I'd been using TextMate for this, exclusively, for a couple of years. Now, with the release of BBEdit 9.0, I'm wavering between the two. Both are wonderful, and writing with Markdown just isn't the same without one of them to help me out. I Love Stars I'm one of those weirdos who likes to keep the Dock out of sight most of the time. I don't use it for launching or switching apps, and I don't use it to keep minimised windows in either. But there are some functions that I like to have in easy reach from anywhere, and that's why I'm a big fan of Menu Bar applications. That said, there's not a lot of Menu Bar to be had on a little MacBook screen, so I'm very picky about which ones get the honor of a place up there. I Love Stars earns a spot. It does nothing but let me assign ratings to songs, but in my opinion it does it very well and, most importantly, sits in the best place for doing it. Jumpcut Another one from the Menu Bar, and this time it's a clipboard history utility that saves my backside 27 times every week. At least. It only saves text, but that's fine for me because that's what matters most in my line of work. With Jumpcut running (and it's always running), I can merrily copy umpteen things from a dozen different places and be sure of pasting them easily, and in the correct places, in the text document I'm writing at the time (see Bean and BBMate raves above). OK, that was five. Sorry.
