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Salesforce acquires visual web clipping service Clipboard

Eliza Kern — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:52:15 +0000

Visual organizer and web content clipper service Clipboard announced Thursday that it’s been acquired by Salesforce and will be shutting down the current operation. AllThingsD is reporting that the company was acquired for somewhere between $10 and $20 million.

The company explained its decision in a blog post on the site:

“We have some bittersweet news. We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale. But at the same time we’re also sad to see this stage of our adventure come to an end, especially since it means that our relationship with you, our users, will irreversibly change. As a result of this news, the Clipboard service at clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.”

I wrote about Clipboard back in September 2012 when it launched its iPhone app and new desktop design. At the time, I noted the similarities between the service and Pinterest, in that they both allow you to save items from across the web and organize that content into “boards.” The Clipboard service allowed you to save links in a way that made them private and fairly useful because of the amount of content that came embedded in clipped material.

“Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.”

In the company’s closing post, it reported that the service only gathered 140,000 users who created about 3 million clips. By comparison, last August Evernote had 40 million users, up from 25 milion in May 2012.

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Visual organizer Clipboard welcomes iPhone app and updated desktop design

Eliza Kern — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:00:13 +0000

With more of life’s tasks moving online every day, it’s always interesting to check out new solutions for collecting, storing, and sharing the digital data we’ve come to rely on. What’s the best way to save those airline reservations or that funny YouTube link and recall it when you need it?

There are a seemingly infinite number of solutions on the market, but Clipboard, a visually-oriented content collector and distributer, is an app that combines the best features of some of those other popular services like Pinterest and Evernote. The startup, which launched publicly in May, is launching an iPhone app and seriously revamping its site and design Tuesday.

Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.

“What you put on Pinterest is really an act of self-expression,” CEO and founder Gary Flake said, noting that 80 percent of clips are set to private.

A desktop bookmark allows users to clip items from across the web. YouTube links will play, URLs re-direct, and Google Maps convert to streetview, all within Clipboard. Users can choose to share clips or boards with other users, meaning a husband and wife could share travel reservations or classmates could share relevant course links with one another.

The new iOS app will allow users to clip and share information from mobile, a feature Flake said many users had requested. The iPhone app will be available in the Apple App Store beginning Tuesday.

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URLHistory Automatically Saves URLs From Your Clipboard

Simon Mackie — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:00:08 +0000

URLHistory is one of those simple but amazingly useful little Windows apps that does one thing really well: It monitors your clipboard looking for copied URLs, and stores them for you to use later. If you frequently end up copying and pasting URLs into a document or text file, perhaps for research, writing an article, or collating a list of file downloads, URLHistory cuts out the step of having to switch applications to paste the URL. What’s more, because you can save a note with each URL saved, it makes it much easier to recall where each URL leads.

It’s a portable app, so just download it, unzip it and run it. Each time you copy a URL to the clipboard, a window will pop up asking you if you want to save it, and giving you the option of editing the accompanying note (by default, it takes the title of the page). Clicking the app’s icon in your system tray will pop up a window showing your list of saved URLs and allow you to manually add to and edit the URLs in your list. URLs can be saved to an HTML file, which makes them easy to import into other apps.

It works really well, although I have noticed a couple of occasions when it’s running that it’s prompted me to save a URL more than once. Also, if you leave it running when you’re not saving URLs for later use, the pop-ups can be a little annoying; you can always shut the app down, though. It’s nowhere near as powerful as a fully-featured bookmarking app like Pinboard or Licorize, or a note-taking app like Evernote, but URLHistory provides a simple, no-fuss way to swiftly save a bunch of URLs.

URLHistory is free, and can be downloaded from the author’s DonationCoder page. Note: According to the Freewaregenius blog, it’s better to download a modified version of the app from this forum thread, as it fixes a bug where URLs containing dashes are truncated.

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ClipUpload: Easily Share Your Clipboard

Simon Mackie — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:03:36 +0000

Ever thought how neat it would be if you could quickly upload whatever was on your clipboard to a server somewhere, either to share with your team or to save for later use? That’s exactly what ClipUpload does. It’s an open-source Windows utility that makes sharing the contents of your clipboard a snap. It’s designed to upload your clippings to an FTP server, but if you don’t have easy access to one, or you don’t want to use FTP, it can also upload to Imgur (for images) and Pastebin (for text and code snippets).

ClipUpload sits in your system tray. You configure it by clicking on the icon, which brings up a window that enables you enter your FTP settings (if you wish to use FTP); you can also set Pastebin and Imgur upload options here and see a log of uploaded files. To upload the contents of your clipboard, just right-click on the icon, which presents you with a context menu giving you upload options: FTP and either Imgur or Pastebin, as appropriate. Once uploaded, ClipUpload places a link to the uploaded file in your clipboard, which then makes it easy to share the file with your colleagues.

I can imagine ClipUpload being very useful for members of distributed teams, particularly for research tasks. By uploading clippings to a shared FTP directory or to a specific Pastebin subdomain (which can be specified in ClipUpload’s settings), team members can quickly and easily share snippets of text, URLs and images from a central repository. Additionally, you could combine ClipUpload with a clipboard management app like Ditto (see my review here) to have a clipboard that can store multiple items and then upload any of them to a sever in just a couple of clicks.

ClipUpload can be downloaded from Sourceforge. It’s a portable app, so it doesn’t need to be installed.

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Ditto: My New Favorite Windows Clipboard Tool

Simon Mackie — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:00:02 +0000

In my recent post about ClipCube, a simple Windows app that enables you to check out previously copied/cut items and re-copy the to the clipboard, I said it was missing a couple of features I would have liked it to have: the ability to handle images and keyboard shortcuts. One of our readers, Brett, helpfully noted in the comments that he uses Ditto, a similar open-source tool that happens to have the functionality I was missing.

I’ve been using Ditto all morning, and I have to say that it’s excellent. Just like ClipCube, it’s unobtrusive and sits out of the way in the system tray until you need it, but it’s more powerful:

Works with mouse or keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys (instructions are detailed here)
Supports images, with thumbnails in the copied item list
Unicode support
Can keep multiple clipboards in sync over the network and send items between clipboards (with encryption)

Because it has more features than ClipCube, it’s more complex; some of its network settings may take a little figuring out, for example. However, its basic functions are very easy to use; I highly recommend it.

Ditto can be downloaded from Sourceforge. It’s available both with an installer and as a portable application.

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10 Clipboard Managers for OS X

Andrew Bednarz — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:00:10 +0000

The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact that the iPhone OS 1.0 & 2.0 did not support a clipboard to see how valuable it is). You most likely use it without giving it another thought.

The standard clipboard behavior is that when you copy a new item, it replaces the existing item. You can’t go back to the previous item as there is no history of items copied. This is what a Clipboard Manager does, providing a memory and browsing history so you can paste something, and then find it later, even after using the clipboard multiple times.

There are quite a few Clipboard Managers available for OS X, some free, some not. Here’s a quick overview of what is on offer and what they can and can’t do.

Clipper

Clipper is the most simple of the clipboard managers available. It sits in the menu bar and allows no-frills access to text clipboard history. It’s an open sourced tool that provides no keyboard shortcuts, but does the job for a simple text clipboard manager.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is another open source clipboard manager that focuses on the basic text history. A customizable hotkey will let you cycle through the various items in the history with an on-screen overlay, or you can directly select an item from the menu bar.

Clyppan

Originally also known as Clipper in earlier versions (name changed to avoid confusion with the Clipper mentioned above), Clyppan is an open source solution that sits in the menu bar, popping up with a customizable hotkey to let you see what’s in the history. Clyppan only supports text clippings, but the history is searchable and pressing the spacebar will give you a Quick Look-style preview of the clipping. It also has a rapid paste function, which pastes the current item, and then sets the clipboard to the next item; this lets you copy lots of items in a row to then quickly paste later on.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu is a freeware clipboard manager that offers support for both text and images. It sits in the menu bar and will break the history into browsable menu sections to avoid UI crowding. It has customizable hotkeys and many functional aspects are configurable, including being able to hold control when selecting an item to perform configurable ‘Actions’ before pasting (such as converting to upper case). ClipMenu also lets you configure regular text clippings for quick access to items you use often.

Savvy Clipboard

Savvy Clipboard is the simplest of the paid offerings, costing $12 (a free trial available). It supports both text and images in the clipboard and provides customizable hotkeys for accessing it.

PTHPasteboard

PTHPasteboard is comprehensive clipboard manager that supports multiple text and image clipboards. The normal version is free, while a Pro version is available for $24.95 that allows you to share and synchronize clipboards across multiple Macs, as well as run configurable filters on text (such as converting to upper case). Full configuration of hotkeys and aspects of the UI is present and you can search the clipboard history to find what you’re looking for.

iClip

iClip is a beautifully designed application (perhaps too fancy for a simple tool) that can behave in a Dock-like way, staying attached to a side of the screen and popping out when the mouse goes to the edge. iClip can handle images as well as text, and also allows groupings of permanently availably items, providing quick access to often used resources. It has fully customizable keyboard and UI behavior support. iClip costs $29 and a free trial (which can be run 30 times) can be downloaded to try it out first. Also available is iClip Lite, which is a completely free Dashboard Widget that allows you to view the clipboard history. If you only need basic use and like using dashboard widgets, the lite version may fit your needs.

Clipboard Evolved

Clipboard Evolved offers multiple custom-named clipboards for both text and images for $15 (a free trial is available). It offers full keyboard hotkey customizing and various UI options (such as a Dock-like display) including various quartz graphics transition effects (and thus requires OS X 10.5).

Cute Clips

Cute Clips is another OS X 10.5 only clipboard manager. It costs $15 and a free 15 day trial is available. It supports both text and images and focuses on a rich UI experience and provides features such as ‘stickying’ a clipping (so it will stay in that position and not drop off), naming a clipboard item, or giving a specific clipping a keyboard shortcut.

Stuf

Like PTHPasteboard, Stuf (formally known as Shadow) offers a shared clipboard across multiple Macs. It lets you create multiple clipboards and elect to make them visible to other Macs. It supports text and images, lets you search the clipboards, allows a customizable hotkey and provides Quick Look integration by pressing the spacebar. Stuf costs around $20 and a 30 day trial is available.

Which one?

There’s a great range of choices for clipboard managers on OS X — all which add great utility to the built in clipboard. I personally have been using Clyppan for a while now as I don’t deal with images often — the fact that it handles text only is no problem for me. However all of the options do their job well so it really just comes down to your workflow requirements and personal usability preference. If you’ve never used a clipboard manager before, give one a try.

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