TidBITS#667/17-Feb-03
=====================
The utilities you choose radically affect your Mac experience, and
this week Adam reviews the Bayesian spam filter SpamSieve and Matt
Neuburg offers a comparison of three Mac OS X multiple clipboard
utilities - PTHPasteboard, Keyboard Maestro, and CopyPaste X.
Also tune in for a Web resource of supporting information for
Mac evangelists. The news brings details of Mac OS X 10.2.4,
Safari v60, Final Cut Express 1.0.1, and USB Overdrive 10.2.1.
Topics:
MailBITS/17-Feb-03
Tools We Use: SpamSieve
Aiding the Case for Macintosh
Multiple Clipboards on Mac OS X
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-667.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#667_17-Feb-03.etx>
Copyright 2003 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
Information: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comments: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* Make friends and influence people by sponsoring TidBITS! <--------- NEW!
Put your company and products in front of tens of thousands of
savvy, committed Macintosh users who actually buy stuff.
For more information and rates, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS going via our voluntary <------ NEW!
contribution program. Special thanks this week to Dave Creek,
Cyrus Roton, and Michael Bradley for their generous support!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
* SMALL DOG ELECTRONICS: AirPort-ables On Sale! <-------------------- NEW!
PowerBook G4/800 w/AirPort $2419!; iBook 14" w/ AirPort $1449!
PowerBook G4/667 with Combo $2058! All come with AirPort!
Visit: <http://www.smalldog.com/tb/> 802/496-7171
* easyDNS: Need a .CA domain? Get it from Canada's leading Domain <-- NEW!
company. All with easyDNS's world class personal tech support.
Finally, a company that actually puts its customers first!
easyDNS: the way things should work. <http://www.easyDNS.com>
* SIX DEGREES: Automatically link messages, files and people so <---- NEW!
you can navigate through projects quickly. Great timesaver!
Works with Microsoft Entourage and Outlook. Free trial version!
=======> <http://www.creo.com/sixdegrees/index.asp?id=tidbits>
* Bare Bones Software BBEdit 7.0 -- New version adds CVS support, <-- NEW!
multiple Web site support, powerful new Sort Lines and Process
Duplicate plug-ins, and much more. Buy, upgrade, or try the
demo at our Web site: <http://www.barebones.com/>
---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/17-Feb-03
------------------
**Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.2.4 Update** -- Apple Computer has
released Mac OS X 10.2.4, which includes networking enhancements
for SMB and AFP file services and improves support for audio
applications under Classic and for FireWire audio devices under
Mac OS X. The update also rolls in several bug fixes for the
Finder, the Classic environment, printing, and the Address Book,
and includes security updates to some of the Unix utilities
underpinning Mac OS X. The update is available via the Software
Update pane in Mac OS X's System Preferences, as a stand-alone
40.1 MB updater for Mac OS X 10.2.3, and as a stand-alone 76 MB
combined updater for any version of Mac OS X 10.2. [GD]
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n107362>
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798>
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n70167>
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n70168>
**Safari Public Beta (v60) 2-12-03 Released** -- Although we
usually don't report beta software updates, Mac OS X users seem
to have embraced Apple's Safari Web browser in a big way, with
more than 1 million copies downloaded, according to Apple. The
latest update, Safari v60, reportedly performs 30 percent faster,
improves the playback of Flash content, adds support for XML, and
enhances support for CSS1. The update is available through
Software Update or as a separate 2.9 MB download. [JLC]
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120182>
**Final Cut Express 1.0.1 Released** -- Continuing its string of
incremental updates, Apple last week posted an update to its
intermediate-level video editing application Final Cut Express.
The 1.0.1 revision improves performance and stability, links
keyframe parameters to the Motion tab, and adds Easy Setup presets
for NTSC and PAL noncontrollable devices. The Final Cut Express
1.0.1 updater is available as a 12.2 MB download. [JLC]
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120190>
**Do You Use Software Update?** Apple's Software Update utility
for automatically downloading and installing updates to the Mac
OS and other Apple software generally works well. But some people
choose not to use it because it can be a bit of a nag when you
want to put off the installation of an update until you've heard
what others say about its stability. For those with dialup
Internet connections, the sheer size of many of Apple's updates
can make scheduling long downloads with Software Update
inconvenient. However, there's no question that Software Update
is almost always the fastest and easiest way to get updates from
Apple, which leads to our poll question this week. We're trying to
find out whether our brief reports of Apple's updates are helpful
even when we have no information to add beyond a summary of the
changes. So, how often do you have Software Update check for new
Apple software? Vote this week on our home page!
<http://www.tidbits.com/>
**USB Overdrive X 10.2.1 Crosses the Finish Line** -- Alessandro
Levi Montalcini has released USB Overdrive X 10.2.1, a universal
USB driver that supports all manner of USB devices, such as mice,
trackballs, joysticks, and gamepads (see "Top Mac OS X Utilities:
Restoring Third Party Capabilities" in TidBITS-625_). Using USB
Overdrive, you can configure the controls of multiple devices to
perform complex actions or launch applications, in addition to
basic actions like clicking. For some people, USB Overdrive X is
essential for using devices whose manufacturers haven't created
Mac OS X drivers. USB Overdrive X 10.2.1 costs $20 shareware, and
is a 476K download. [JLC]
<http://www.usboverdrive.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06779>
Tools We Use: SpamSieve
-----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Having to sort through the increasingly repulsive spam that's
rushing into our electronic mailboxes is becoming more unpleasant
than ever. You can reduce the flow, though, with one of three
basic approaches to filtering spam out of your email stream:
Boolean filters, points-based filters, and so-called "Bayesian"
statistical filters. Put simply, a Boolean filter looks for string
of text, and if it's found, considers the message spam. Points-
based filters refine that approach, assigning (or removing)
points for each criteria matched by a given message; they decide
if a message is spam or not by how many points that message
accumulates. Statistical (or Bayesian) filters, which were most
popularly described in relation to spam in August of 2002 (and
refined last month) by Paul Graham, use a statistical approach
that combines the probability that any given word or phrase
(implementations vary) to decide if the message is spam.
<http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html>
<http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html>
**Bayesian Filters** -- The beauty of Bayesian filtering is that
it works on the contents of your email, which is probably rather
different from mine and anyone else's. That's because you must
train a Bayesian filter with a sample of both spam and legitimate
messages, and because the Bayesian filter continually examines new
messages, it can adapt to the kind of mail you receive, both good
and bad.
Bayesian filters aren't perfect. Legitimate mail, such as
promotional mailings from companies you've bought from in the
past, can look a lot like spam at first, and it's also hard to
identify spam messages with minimal text accurately. Spam may get
through when it's sufficiently related to your profession; for
instance, I get spam advertising translation services because of
the TidBITS translations. It's also possible for spammers to
pollute your corpus of good and bad words by including lots of
good words in a spam message, thus reducing the accuracy of the
filter over time. On the positive side, it's possible that
improved algorithms can address these problems.
There are two main implementations of statistical Bayesian
filtering for Mac OS X: Apple's Mail and Michael Tsai's SpamSieve,
the latter of which I've been testing with Eudora 5.2 for some
months now.
**SpamSieve** -- Along with its implementation of Bayesian filter,
I especially appreciate the fact that SpamSieve works inside
Eudora, and also inside a number of other email programs,
including Entourage, Mailsmith, and PowerMail. Although it's not
available for Mac OS 9, it does also work with Emailer running
in Classic mode. I'm not interested in using Mail, and other
spam utilities (such as Matterform Media's points-based Spamfire
utility, which also has many proponents) work outside of your
email program, forcing you to scan for false positives in a
separate interface). SpamSieve works with any number of accounts
and filters mail from any source your email program supports. Once
it has identified messages as spam, it can mark or move them, and
in some of the email programs, your filters can continue to work
on the marked messages.
<http://www.matterform.com/>
SpamSieve accomplishes this by using the AppleScript capabilities
of these email programs to pass information to and from SpamSieve
itself. The integration is relatively seamless, except in Eudora,
the current version of which has limitations that restrict
SpamSieve to filtering mail that ends up in the In box (not in any
other folder). Since the communication happens via AppleScript,
you can edit the included scripts to customize them further. Even
while I'm waiting for the next version of Eudora to bring
SpamSieve's capabilities to messages I filter out of my In
box, I've found it extremely worthwhile.
I initially trained SpamSieve with about 600 spam messages from my
disgustingly large collection of spam and 600 good messages from
my In box (yes, it has been that full, though I've beaten it back
down into the 300s). If you don't have spam around, you could
either train SpamSieve as you receive it (probably with lower
accuracy at first) or wait briefly until you've collected a
representative sample. I've also told SpamSieve to learn from new
messages. Since the middle of January, SpamSieve has filtered over
2,600 messages, about 55 percent of which were spam. In that time,
it has reported 88 percent accuracy, with a false negative rate of
11 percent and a false positive rate of 1 percent (an alternative
way I've used to verify SpamSieve's accuracy came up with lower
numbers - 80 percent accuracy, with 19 percent false negatives -
I'm working with Michael Tsai to figure out the discrepancy). Most
of the false positives were solicited commercial email or messages
forwarded to me and a large number of other people, both of which
are likely to run afoul of SpamSieve's filtering until it has been
trained to recognize similar messages. Because SpamSieve filters
on the contents of your particular email stream, your mileage may
vary, as it has for other TidBITS staff members, who have seen
somewhat less reliable results.
New features in SpamSieve 1.3 include increased resilience to the
ways spammers are now obfuscating common words, the capability to
use email addresses in Apple's Address Book as a whitelist (so
mail from people whose addresses are stored in the Address Book
is never considered spam), editing of SpamSieve's corpus of words,
type-to-select in the Corpus window, and the capability to see
statistics from after any given date.
If you've longed for the Bayesian filtering in Apple's Mail, but
weren't willing to give up your preferred email program for that
one capability, I'd strongly encourage you to take a look at
SpamSieve. Michael Tsai is developing it actively, and has been
extremely responsive to comments and suggestions.
SpamSieve 1.3 is $20 shareware (upgrades from previous versions
are free) and is a 1.5 MB download.
<http://www.c-command.com/spamsieve/>
PayBITS: Did Adam's article turning you on to SpamSieve
seriously reduce your spam volume? Say thanks via PayBITS!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
<http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P2HI4FNQWZA9U0>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Aiding the Case for Macintosh
-----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
We at TidBITS generally try to avoid becoming entangled in the
morass of computer religious wars, in particular the long-running
battle between the Mac and Windows. We're more or less functional
in Windows, but we prefer using Macs, mostly because we find using
the Mac to be both more enjoyable and more productive. Due to our
obvious and long-standing preference for the Macintosh, and
despite our trying to stay above the fray, people often ask
us to help them argue for why their school, business, or family
member should buy Macs instead of PCs.
It's a tricky problem, because we like to help those in need,
and we generally agree with the sentiment that the Mac is almost
always just as good of a choice, if not a better one, than a
comparable PC. But at the same time, we hate being dragged into
the whole sordid discussion: we're not zealots, and we simply
don't have the energy to participate in numerous individual
efforts to establish Mac enclaves in a world dominated by Windows.
Our advice in this respect has long paralleled that of our late
friend and colleague, Cary Lu, who always recommended that you buy
the type of computer used by your closest technical friend, the
sort of person you could call for help late on a Saturday night.
Cary also noted that people concerned about what type of computers
students would use after graduation shouldn't worry about what
happens in elementary school, because the rapid pace of computer
evolution ensures radical differences by the time an elementary
school student leaves college. Back in 1995, we published an
article by Cary about the state of the Mac versus PC holy war;
its details are amusingly out-of-date in places, but it's still
a trenchant read.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01431>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04169>
Well-reasoned though Cary's arguments were, many people attempting
to convince others of the advantages of the Macintosh find that
they need more ammunition. Numerous news stories and studies have
supported the pro-Macintosh position over the years, but it has
been almost impossible to track them or find the relevant bits
when needed.
Now, however, there's a single site you can visit for a massive
conglomeration of surveys, articles, and factoids relevant to the
question of choosing Macs over PCs. The site was created by John
Droz as part of a campaign he and a group of taxpayers in Carteret
County, North Carolina, undertook to prevent the local Board of
Education from switching county schools from Macs to PCs.
<http://macvspc.info/>
John fully admits he's not a Web designer, so the individual
pages, each filled with numerous links, can be somewhat daunting.
(He welcomes design assistance, if you would like to help.)
Nonetheless, if you're in the middle of making the case for the
Macintosh somewhere in your life, the more-than 400 referenced
reports, studies, and news articles that John has collected will
be helpful. In some cases, the best approach may be to download
the 1 MB PDF version of the entire site, since it's easier to
scan or search for the specific pieces of information that may
help your case. It has numerous internal links and bookmarks,
along with external links to the Web where necessary. In the right
circumstance, it might also be useful to print out the entire 112
pages so you have a stack of paper bolstering your argument.
<http://forgetcomputers.com/~jdroz/websitePDFs/MACvsPCCombined.pdf>
The amount of work that John has put into collecting and compiling
these resources is impressive, and it's worth noting that many of
the articles and reports are from 2002, so the information isn't
terribly out of date, like so much else on the Internet. If you
find yourself needing references to support your argument in favor
of using a Mac, you'll find John's efforts extremely welcome.
PayBITS: Did this article aid your Mac evangelism? Say
thanks by sending John Droz a few bucks via PayPal.
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=aaprjohn%40northnet.org
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Multiple Clipboards on Mac OS X
-------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
We all copy and paste without thinking about it. Can you remember
back to when you started using a Mac and were introduced to the
notions of copying and pasting, and the invisible but omnipresent
"clipboard"? Probably you understood right away, thought to
yourself, "good idea," and just moved on. At that time, you also
had to internalize the fact that any time you copy, you wipe off
the clipboard whatever you copied previously.
This fact is probably by now so deeply internalized that you no
longer realize how much it dictates your working habits. You are
unconsciously careful, after copying (or even more critical, after
cutting, which makes the data live in the clipboard and nowhere
else) not to hit Command-C again until you've pasted the current
clipboard to retain it. Nevertheless, I bet you've made that
mistake on occasion, each time cursing at the loss of the
previously copied data.
Another frequent situation is that you have more than one thing to
move from one place to another, either within the same application
or between applications. You're probably so accustomed to
inconvenient ways of coping with this necessity that you don't
even think of them as workarounds. For example, knowing that
you need to move three sentences from various places within a
paragraph, you copy and paste the whole paragraph and pare down
the pasted results afterwards. But there are also situations where
this strategy fails, and you've probably found yourself resigned
to going back and forth, back and forth between two applications,
copying and pasting, copying and pasting.
Various individual applications assist with these difficulties.
Many applications let you split a window so that you can see two
parts of the same document at once, which makes it a lot easier
to move bits from one general area to another. And more and more
applications now provide multiple internal clipboards, or
something equivalent: for example, Nisus Writer, BBEdit, and
Microsoft Word do this. But what's really needed is multiple
clipboards at the system level, and it's no credit to Apple that
the clipboard of 2003 is so much like that of 1984.
The situation is particularly surprising in view of the fact
that Mac OS X's clipboard underpinnings are considerably more
sophisticated than in previous systems. The clipboard is now
the responsibility of a background daemon called "pbs" (for
"Pasteboard Server"). This daemon is perfectly adequate to provide
multiple clipboards (pasteboards), and in fact already does so.
You may have noticed, for example, that the text you enter into
the Find dialog in Safari then shows up in the Find dialog in
BBEdit; that's because pbs maintains a separate Find Pasteboard.
In fact, pbs maintains five pasteboards, and applications are
free to add others. Thus, if you were the developer of two
applications, you could allow each of them to copy and paste extra
data by way of a sixth pasteboard, which other applications could
use too if they knew about it. At present, however, only one of
pbs's pasteboards is the General Pasteboard, the one that all
applications know about and share during Copy and Paste
operations. To implement multiple pasteboards at system level
would be simply a matter of adding more General Pasteboards, and
providing an user interface to them. (Look at BBEdit to see how
such an interface might work.)
Anyway, until Apple wakes up to these possibilities, there are
third-party utilities to provide multiple clipboards on Mac OS X
right now, and this article describes three of them:
PTHPasteboard, Keyboard Maestro, and CopyPaste X.
**PTHPasteboard** -- PTHPasteboard's chief virtues are its
simplicity and its price (free!). It's an ordinary application
that runs in the background; it has no Dock icon, but rather
appears as an icon in the rightward part of the menu bar. Every
so often (I believe it's every half-second) behind the scenes, it
polls the clipboard, and if the clipboard's contents have changed
it adds them to a list. Thus, as long as you don't copy too
frequently, all your copied material (up to a user-configurable
limit) finds its way into this list. From here it can be recovered
and pasted.
To see the list, you do one of three things. You can click on
the PTHPasteboard icon in the menu bar; you can type a user-
configurable hot key combination; or you can choose from the
Services menu, in those applications that support services. Any of
these brings up a floating window listing the currently saved bits
of clipboard data; clicking one pastes it at the insertion point
in the current application, or you can hit the Escape key to
dismiss the window.
PTHPasteboard doesn't work well with Classic applications -
it doesn't paste at all, though it does seem to see copied
material correctly, and it can usually at least alter the
contents of the clipboard even if it can't make them appear
in a document. Its menu item in the Services menu uses the
keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-V, and this can't be changed -
a minor point, since it doesn't interfere with any other
application's use of this shortcut, but it does mean that
such an application overrides PTHPasteboard's use of it, and
in any case user-configurability would be nice. Its appearance
as an icon in the menu bar is often useless to me, since typically
my real menu items crowd out any extra menu bar icons, and it's
unnecessary because the floating window can be summoned with
a keyboard shortcut instead. (The menu bar icon can be removed,
but then you have to keep the floating window always visible;
I don't see the logic behind this.)
But these are quibbles. PTHPasteboard is robust, it's simple,
it has a small footprint in memory and CPU time, it does the job,
and it's free.
<http://www.pth.com/PTHPasteboard/>
**Keyboard Maestro** -- Keyboard Maestro, by Michael Kamprath, is
actually a sort of macro utility. It revolves around the notion
of attaching a keyboard shortcut to an action or sequence of
actions; such actions can include things like hiding applications,
opening a particular file or folder, running an AppleScript or
Unix script, typing text, and changing sound volume or screen
brightness. It's an application switcher, too. And it also
functions as a multiple clipboard utility, which is why it
has found its way into this article.
Keyboard Maestro's multiple clipboard interface is somewhat
similar to PTHPasteboard's, and is also reminiscent of John V.
Holder's QuickScrap, which I remember using on Mac OS 9 some years
ago. It responds to particular user-configurable keyboard
shortcuts for cutting, copying, and pasting. When you cut or
copy with one of these keyboard shortcuts instead of the standard
Command-X or Command-C, Keyboard Maestro puts up a window with a
list of clipboards; here, you choose either to append a new
clipboard to the existing list or to reuse one of the existing
clipboards. The clipboards can be assigned names, and you can get
some idea of what's in them through a tooltip that appears when
you hover the mouse over one of them. Keyboard Maestro performs
the cut or copy back in the application you were originally in,
puts it on the normal clipboard and in its own clipboard list,
and returns you to what you were doing. Pasting works similarly;
Keyboard Maestro shows you its list of clipboards, and you pick
the one you wish to paste.
<http://www.johnvholder.com/qsdesc.html>
Keyboard Maestro has the advantage of being extremely clean and
simple. It's also free, as long as you don't want more than four
clipboards at time (and just $20 to get as many as you like).
Plus, of course, you get Keyboard Maestro's other macro and
application-switching features, which you can use or disable
as you please. It doesn't work well with Classic; in my tests,
copying or pasting with Keyboard Maestro in Classic applications
caused the current selection to be changed, so that the wrong
material was copied or replaced in the document. On the other
hand, PTHPasteboard doesn't work well with Classic either, so
between the two of them it comes down largely to a choice between
very different interfaces and overall approaches.
PTHPasteboard doesn't require any special action on your part in
order to remember what you copy; it simply remembers everything
that passes through the system's clipboard. That's great for those
times when you realize after the fact that you need some material
copied earlier, but it also means that everything you copy is
remembered whether you like it or not. Thus, if you set the list
size at ten, and you realize that you need the data from eleven
copies ago, you're out of luck because it's fallen off the end of
the list. You get no choice between copying to PTHPasteboard's
list and just copying normally. Keyboard Maestro, on the other
hand, offers exactly this choice. That's good, but now you face
the opposite disadvantage: if you don't remember to copy something
with Keyboard Maestro explicitly, it doesn't go onto the list.
Also, having to pass through a window every time you want to copy
to Keyboard Maestro's list might strike you as helpful or might
deter you from using it at all. It's all a matter of your
particular needs and your peculiar psychological makeup. The
best way to see how you feel about the interface is to try it.
<http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/>
**CopyPaste X** -- CopyPaste X is the descendant of the Classic
extension I reviewed in TidBITS-364_ from 1997. In Mac OS X, it's
an ordinary application, which means it's more compatible and
reliable than ever before. It also means you don't have to run
it all the time; I frequently don't, and then when I want it I
can launch it from anywhere, using a universal contextual menu
item that it optionally installs.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00751>
Once CopyPaste is running, it provides ten numbered clipboards,
accessible most simply by keyboard shortcuts that work within any
application: Command-C-1, Command-V-1, Command-C-2, Command-V-2,
and so forth (the trick is to hold the Command key while striking
first the letter, then the number). You can turn these shortcuts
off, or replace Command with Control. Furthermore, these ten
clipboards constitute a set, and you can switch among any number
of sets, again using a universal contextual menu, or with
CopyPaste's Dock menu, or by means of a floating palette.
Furthermore, every time you copy or cut in the ordinary way,
the data goes onto a Clipboard Recorder list (similar to
PTHPasteboard), accessible in the same three ways.
These features are supposed to work across the Classic boundary,
in cooperation with the Classic CopyPaste extension (version 4.5).
When this cooperation is working, it behaves just as you would
expect: what's copied with Command-C-1 on one side of the X-
Classic boundary can be pasted with Command-V-1 on the other
side, and whatever is copied in the ordinary way on one side
ends up in the Clipboard Recorder on the other. Plus, the
CopyPaste X palettes can be used to copy and paste in Classic
applications. My experience, however, is that this cooperation
is rather flaky. You must start up CopyPaste X before you start
up Classic, and the Classic extension loses its ability to list
the ten clipboards hierarchically in the Edit menu. More
important, sometimes Classic will crash, and often CopyPaste X
will freeze up and stop working altogether (and at this point
it can even interfere with the ability to do ordinary copy and
paste). For stability, therefore, I find it best to disable
CopyPaste Classic altogether, which is a pity.
CopyPaste also contains a surprisingly full-featured word
processor (the "clipboard editor"), and implements a number of
text-munging functions (changing to lowercase, for example).
I regard these features as unnecessary bloat. Text-munging would
be better implemented separately, as a Service perhaps; properly
speaking it has nothing to do with the clipboard at all. Word
processing should be left to the user's choice of dedicated word
processor. Instead of these ancillary features, I'd prefer to see
attention paid to better reliability in the cooperation between
the Mac OS X and Classic versions.
The manual is pretty good, but it requires the built-in word
processor, and has not been always been correctly or completely
translated from the original German. This adds to one's overall
sense that many areas of CopyPaste suffer from a rather amateurish
quality. Nonetheless, at $20 CopyPaste remains a bargain, and
its implementation on Mac OS X is a significant achievement.
Personally, I like its interface the best, in particular the
keyboard shortcuts Command-C-1 and Command-V-1 and so forth, which
allow me to communicate with each specific clipboard numerically
by means of the keyboard alone.
<http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste/>
**Picking a Paste Pot** -- Whatever utility you choose, you owe it
to yourself to try multiple clipboards. You'll wonder how you ever
got any serious work done without them. Having only one clipboard
is like being able to use only application at a time; it's
downright primitive, the sort of thing we ought to have left
behind back in the days of System 6. Thanks to these utilities,
you can save your Mac OS X machine from this Dark Ages holdover.
PayBITS: Did this article help you work better? Copy and paste
the URL below into a Web browser and support Matt via PayPal!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=matt%40tidbits.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
$$
Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if
full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee
accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and
company names may be registered trademarks of their companies.
This file is formatted as setext. For more information send email
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. A file will be returned shortly.
For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues,
and more, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Send comments and editorial submissions to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back issues available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>
And: <ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/>
Full text searching available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/search/>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
