Shareware Spotlight Featuring ClipMate

In The Spotlight: ClipMate

by Al Harberg of DP Directory

ClipMate Makes You More Productive by Making the Windows Clipboard Work Better

ClipMate at a glance:

ClipMate 7.3 from Thornsoft Development, Inc. is a handy Windows clipboard extender that turns the under-powered Windows clipboard into a graphics and text powerhouse. Users can organize, view, manage, search, and edit their clips using a familiar interface that is similar to Windows Explorer.

ClipMate enhances the bare-bones Windows clipboard by remembering all graphics and text that you copy to the clipboard, and storing them in user-defined collections for later use. ClipMate has an enormous capacity to hold your clips. The standard Windows clipboard will hold one item; the Microsoft Office clipboard will hold 24 items; and many other competitive clipboard-extender products will hold 10-20 items. ClipMate can easily store thousands of items. You can save time by storing words, sentences and images that you use over and over, and pasting them into emails and letters on-the-fly. ClipMate is an ideal companion when working on projects that require the collection of text and images, or consolidation of data from different sources. Power users will appreciate ClipMate's multi-monitor screen capture, and features for sharing clips among multiple PCs. ClipMate version 7 adds powerful drag/drop processing. The program integrates with the Windows taskbar, and makes pasting your data even easier than in earlier versions.

I first met ClipMate's author, Chris Thornton, at the Shareware Industry Conference in Providence, Rhode Island in 1998. Even though I've been using ClipMate since early 1999, I'm actually a late adopter. ClipMate was first released in 1991, and has been considered by many to be the top Windows clipboard extender for years and years. ClipMate has won the Shareware Industry Award for "best utility" four times.

I bought ClipMate because I was doing research on the Internet, and the limitations of the Windows clipboard were frustrating. With ClipMate, I was able to copy information efficiently, and paste it at leisure. Soon, I learned to build clips of text that I use over and over, such as my postal-address and standard responses to email inquiries that I receive in my business.

In addition to saving time, I've eliminated typos. I simply correct my clips once, and each time I paste them, I know that they're correct. Every month I'm finding new time-saving ways to use ClipMate to manage my information flow.

ClipMate is now portable. There's a version that runs on any removable drive equipped with the U3 Smart Launchpad or the PortableApps.com menu. Simply install ClipMate onto a removable USB drive, and insert the drive into another Windows-based PC. The program and clips are immediately available. And all of your clips are stored on the USB drive, with no residual changes made to the host PC.

ClipMate runs on Windows 98, 2000, XP, and Vista. A single-user license costs $34.95 USD, and allows you to run ClipMate on two computers. So, with a single-user license, you can use ClipMate at home and at work. Or you can have one copy for your computer, and one for the kids' machine.

You can choose between the desktop, U3, and PortableApps versions. Site licenses are available. For more information, visit http://www.thornsoft.com/. You can download a free trial version from http://www.thornsoft.com/dist/ClipMate7.exe

If you don't do much copying and pasting, maybe that's because the regular Windows clipboard is under-powered and frustrating. Don't give up on cut 'n' paste until you've tried it with ClipMate. You'll find new time-saving ways to use the clipboard.

• ClipMate
• System Requirements: Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista
• Download ClipMate NOW!