Clipboard Manager and History

 Anyone who’s used a clipboard manager on their computer knows it’s incredibly useful…well thank you OS3 for allowing this goodness to hit the iPhone, in this case with Clipboard Manager and History from Alessandro Pappalardo.  The premise is simple, a piece of software running in the background that remembers everything you ever copied to the clipboard for instant recall.  Wait you say, Apple doesn’t allow background processing…and you’re quite correct…so that feature is not present here (nor in any other 3rd party app).  Let’s just see what we have left after taking away that important function and what enhancements might have been added to try and make up for it.

This app is able to store 2 types of data:  all text ever copied and all URL’s ever copied from Safari, both types stored in descending order by date.  The UI separates this into, not surprisingly, text and URL tabs so when you load the app you choose a tab then select which data you want copied to the clipboard for immediate use.  That’s the core functionality…any extras?  Yes, from the text tab you can email any clip and from the url tab you can do likewise or go straight there via Safari.  Unfortunately, that’s effectively it which brings me right to gripes and suggestions.

• Where’s the image support?  At present it does not support copying of images, a huge feature gap.
• You can delete any single item from history but there’s no option to wipe everything; this is sorely needed.
• If you want to email a clip the app has to exit and launch the default email app (however note the app store description states the forthcoming 1.1 update will support inline email).
• When you select an item to copy to the clipboard, it doesn’t move to the top of the queue.  The app’s insistence on statically sorting clips by date starts to break down the larger your history becomes and you’re just looking for ‘that one clip’ you need.  This also means you can’t manually resort the queue.  Definitely would like to see some work done here to allow different sort options (descending by date, ascending by date, most recently used, least recently used, etc).
• No support for custom clipboards

version reviewed – 1.0.1
reviewed on  – iPhone 3GS 16GB OS3.0