High Quality, Intuitive Design, Can only go up from here

As most apps do not appeal to me, to solicit my time for a review, I don’t comment much unless the app is really good, really bad, or is really the sign of promise for a lot more potential.

When I was using Windows (outside of Parallels), I loved a program called AceText by JGSoft. It left a void not being able to find a sufficient clipboard manager, on Mac, which could hold all my clips and allow me to go back and reference something I needed to reuse or recall. I’ve tried other clipboard managers, but they were greatly lacking in various areas and left me searching for more. In addition to very basic features, the main thing is they seemed not to allow me to hold enough clips.

With Copy’Em Paste, you have options. Especially if you need to recall a lot of things as a student, developer, designer, or researcher. Look, you can set how many clips you want it to remember at a time before it starts purging the oldest clips unstarred clips. The number you can set appears to be very, very high. You can also set the app to delete unstarred clip when the app quits, or, set the app to star automatically everything that is copied to the clipboard, so there is no threshold applied, and items are never automatically purged. I thought I’d want to use that option, but once I used the program, I found that I liked manually starring only what I wanted to keep, and allowing only the newest 500 to stay in memory/saved at a time providing plenty of back reference. If you have your threshold set with a high enough number, you can go back and star clips you want to keep, later on. If you do not want to wait for an automatic purge, there is a button to clear all the clips in the list that are currently visible, and another to clear all clips that are not starred.

The app is not limited to plain text, but rich text and images are also among what is stored. You can categorize all your clips and edit clipped text so when you paste it, it says what you’d like it to. Clicking on a clip makes it paste into the currently open program and re-copy to the clipboard, but you can also right click a clip and simply just write it to the clipboard so it does not automatically paste.

It’s got a little transform menu that allows you to transform the pasted text using some presets, such as Make Upper Case, Make Lower Case, Capitalize, Strip White Spaces, and Trim Surrounded White Spaces, Append text and Prepend Text. I enjoy that feature a lot. My critique on that feature is, the author should update the transform list to include custom REGULAR EXPRESSIONS as saved presets, so the user can apply a regular expression to pasted text. Developers would love a feature like that, and it would be likely to generate a lot of praise and attention to the app. Also, consider possibly adding the inclusion of tokens, such as auto-numbering tokens (%n%) that can be included to append/prepend/regex text that can be set to start and increment at any number and count up or down, and time/date stamp tokens. Also, the ability to combine selected clips with users choice of delimiter would also be great. I know I create functions and array’s, so that would help a developer.

Other features already included with this great app, is you can filter clips by the category-star you saved the clip in, including All, My Shortcuts, and Unstarred filters. You can filter by all, text, images, links, files/folders. You can also filter by what app you copied the clip from. You can use those filter sets at together because they are separate filter menu.

The app lives in the Menu Bar (you can turn it off in settings). When you click the app in the menu bar, there is a little pin you can click to pin the app on the screen, so it does not automatically close when you click away or click on a clip (which inserts the clicked test). That is great if you have a bunch of clips that you want to paste, by clicking in a succession.

So while there are features that one can long for like Christmas, this is a well-rounded app, as is. If you need to refer to paste items often, its a must have. If you don’t have it but thinking about it, I would go for it while it is on sale, and also while cheap.

Ambriel Angel about Copy 'Em