CuteClips is a small app that stores the last twelve entries in your clipboard.

It can store up images, URLs, text or files in a nice smoked glass dialog, complete with preview and is activated by a hotkey

A new version, released today, offers a smart improvement to the way you can select the clippings. In the past, you has to tab, or use the arrow keys or mouse to select the clip you wanted.

Now, hitting Control reveals the numbering of the clips, and hitting the corresponding Function key paste that entry in:

There are other utilities that do that same thing, notably CopyPaste, which offers far richer features but is also far more expensive (USD 30). Quicksilver can do this too, but lacks the facility to make a clipping sticky and thus available forever (it doesn’t actually lack this — see Henning’s remarks in the comments).

CuteClips does the job for me, making my work in Mail.app and elsewhere faster and more efficient.

It costs only 5 euros (USD 6) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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After a few lovely days in the country, here’s this week’s update to the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.

Just one addition: I’ve added CopyPaste to the Miscellaneous section, where you can also find other utilities that make working with text in Mail.app (and elsewhere) easier and faster.

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Imagine a utility that bundles together the auto-expanding text snippet features of Textpander and the multiple clipboard functions of iClip.

CopyPaste + yType is it.

Like iClip or iSnip, it offers multiple clipboards and adds access through the contextual menu to make insertion even easier. It can also automatically record the history of the things that you have copied.

Like Textpander, this app offers predefined keyboard shortcuts for inserting blocks of frequently used text.

This makes working faster, of course, but also reduces the amount of errors in your typing. Further spelling errors are reduced by its ability to correct common spelling errors on the fly like Microsoft’s “autocorrect feature”.

The clipboard, text snippet features and preferences are all accessible through an icon in the Statusbar.

MacAddict Magazine describes it as “the turbo clipboard utility on steriods”. I’ve only been playing with CopyPaste for thirty minutes, but I can already see how this is going to make working in Apple Mail (and with text more generally) faster, more error-free and easier on the fingers.

CopyPaste is shareware (USD 30) and is available from the developer’s web site. It offers a thirty day free trial period during which you could play around with it and see if the utility lives up to its promise. That’s what I will be doing.

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