Frank Petrie phranky@mamugs.com

Ok, we're going back in time. Close your eyes and take a deep cleansing breath. Good. Relaxed? Now, do you remember a much-overlooked feature in the older Mac OSs called ScrapBook? Yes, the one with the drawing of the sun, the one of the car and that weird little sound effect.

Well, for those of you who hold a special place in your hearts for certain features that have faded into memory, here comes iClip. The natural evolution of ScrapBook, from the nice folks at Inventive. (If you ask me, and you didn't, I would consider this more of an uber-Clipboard than a ScrapBook.)

THE GOOD

"Drag this file into your Applications folder." Preferences are simple and intuitive. The app comes with an e-manual which is quite thorough. You can add customized Hot Keys if you want, one click copying and pasting, drag-n-drop, vertical/horizontal orientation and loads more.

You can save your clips in a multitude of sets. For example, I have a set for repeated text blocks in my reviews. For example, I have a set for repeated text blocks in my reviews. :-) I have separate ones for emails, business letters and web site codings, as well. If you need it, you can create a set for it.

Everything about this app is straight forward which makes using (and reviewing) a breeze.

THE BAD

It sits in the foreground and there isn't anything you can do about it. This needs to be more like a Konfabulator Widget, where you can assign it a level (foreground, normal, background). Inventive is currently looking for the best way to implement this feature in upcoming versions.

At this point, editing a text clipping in the Clipping Set renders it into plain text, though Inventive has already announced plans to change this in a future release.

THE UGLY

It doesn't save sound files such as MP3 or .aiff . Then again, iClip is not designed to work with files, but is primarily geared toward working with clippings (via the Clipboard or drag-n-drop from applications). However, I think that it would be a bonus if you could save small audio files, such as alert beeps, within iClip. But Inventive is planning on adding the ability for iClip to have clipping bins that can contain aliases to files (of any type).

NUTSHELL

iClip is another one of that breed of apps that is a one-trick pony that does its trick extremely well. Other than the few things I mentioned, this app is golden and an incredible time saver. And money saver, too.

Buy it. Now.

(c)2003 Frank Petrie, Technologies & Products Specialist The Mid-Atlantic Macintosh User Groups Team (MaMUGs) http://www.mamugs.org Email: phranky@mamugs.com