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ClipMate version 3.1 
by Susan Ives, Alamo PC
Read the review of the newly-released version 4.01. Better than ever!

 
I have always harbored a secret hatred for the Windows clipboard. It's chintzy and we all know it. It works fine for the basic stuff, such as shuffling around paragraphs and duplicating graphics, but it can only hold one thing at a time. I do a lot of cutting and pasting between applications, and it's a pain up the wazoo to have to open up my word processor every time I want to swipe a paragraph. I want a clipboard that can walk and chew gum at the same time. 

 Don Logan told me about a $25 shareware program called ClipMate. I run it as part of my startup routine and it sits patiently in the upper right corner of my screen waiting for me to copy something. When I do, it keeps it. Forever. It maintains a handy scrolling list of the last 100 items that I copied and if an item is really important, I can stuff it into the safe where it can live until doomsday. 

 I use ClipMate a dozen times every day: 
 
 

  • I can never remember ASCII character set that pumps out the copyright symbol ©. Now I keep it in ClipMate. When I need a ©, I highlight the ClipMate entry, position my cursor and paste the symbol using ctrl+v. It's done, and I can save my brain space for more important things. 
  • I often stumble across cool Internet World Wide Web addresses in newsgroups and mailing lists. I used to scribble them down on little pieces of paper and lose them before I could get around to the Web to check them out. Now I copy them into ClipMate. When I finally do get around to a surfing session, I click on the open location icon in Netscape. In ClipMate, I point to the WWW address I want, hit ctrl+v, and all the typing is done for me. Perfectly. I no longer confuse a 1 with an l or forget to capitalize a word. The process is automated, just the way it's supposed to be. 
  • I crank out a lot of boilerplate stuff that requires just a smidgen of customizing When I did the publicity for the Alamo Bowl Online, I send out more than 100 online press releases, and sent an equal number of short blurbs to various indices and directories. I stored all of the info in ClipMate and every bit of information I needed was at my fingertips. 
  • I made templates for most of the pages on the Alamo PC homepage. When I want to use one, I point to it in ClipMate, paste it into my Hot Dog HTML editing program and it's there. 
  • I keep my company logo in ClipMate. I can cut and paste it into anything, anywhere. ClipMate can handle graphics, audio files , charts, databases and spreadsheets. It automatically detects what formats each application that I use handles, and I can specify the format that I want to save it in. It even handles my Pagemaker files. 
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toolbar ClipMate has three viewing options: I can look at an index, which is what I do most of the time. I can magnify an entry and look at the whole shebang at once, and even edit it, if need be. There is also a thumbnail option, where all of the entries are laid out in a grid. 

The program works fine with Windows 95. In Win 95 I can copy bits of documents and drag them onto a desktop, but this gives me a cluttered desktop; ClipMate consolidates everything. Win 95 comes with ClipBook, which is better than Clipboard in Windows 3.11, but that utility isn't automated. ClipMate automatically saves and names my scraps; in Win 95 I have to do this manually. Are you listening, Bill Gates? 

 ClipMate is shareware, and at one time was available on the Alamo PC BBS. It is available on the Internet, at http://www.thornsoft.com. The author, Thornton Software Solutions, 155 Southridge Drive, Rochester, NY 14626, provides 90 days of technical support for registered users. You can reach them at this address or by dropping them an Internet e-mail at 70743.2546@compuserve.com. The online help is outstanding, and the registered version comes with a printed manual. Installation was a no-brainer. It requires some flavor of Windows to operate, and eats about half a megabyte of your hard disk. 

 I have two shareware utilities on my computers that I could not live without. One is WinZip and the other is ClipMate. I've used ClipMate four times in writing this review. I pasted in the copyright symbol, I grabbed the Internet address directly from Netscape, and I made a copy of the entire review that I will paste into an e-mail message to David Savage and again into an HTML document that will end up on our home page on the World Wide Web. Try taking this program away from me and you've got a fight on your hands.