Noticed this is on sale at Bits DuJour today. I've never heard of the app before, but it looks like it might be useful.

Has anyone used it?

Try ClipX (or Clip-X). I think it's free. I've been very happy with it.
-c

Gary Carson wrote:

Noticed this is on sale at Bits DuJour today. I've never heard of the app before, but it
looks like it might be useful.

Has anyone used it?

textBEAST looks good and a lot of people would probably find it useful, but I don't like the fact that you have to open the application and select where you want your clipped text to go before you copy it. I might be wrong about the way it works since I haven't read through all the documentation, but the ergonomics seems pretty awkward.

CintaNotes is the best personal notes manager of this kind I've ever found. You can copy text directly to a note in CintaNotes without ever opening the program. It just has to be running in the system tray. Highlight the text you want to copy, then CTL-F12 and you're done. That's all there is to it. And if you want to write a note yourself, a hot key will open the note editor. You never have to take your hands off the keyboard.

I hope Alex (?) keeps developing CintaNotes. It's the most ergonomic program I've used in a long time. I'd definitely be willing to pay for a license in the future.

Gary Carson wrote:

CintaNotes is the best personal notes manager of this kind I've ever
found. You can copy text directly to a note in CintaNotes without ever opening the
program. It just has to be running in the system tray. Highlight the text you want to
copy, then CTL-F12 and you're done. That's all there is to it. And if you want to write a
note yourself, a hot key will open the note editor. You never have to take your hands off
the keyboard.

The idea of a ready-and-waiting inbox sounds very interesting, but I can see a certain conflict with my current setup: Ctrl-F12 is used in Surfulater to create a new folder, and cannot be re-assigned. Is it possible to change the hotkey in CintaNotes?

An issue I have with these wonderful tools for collecting information is that they don't always make it easy to get that information out, selectively, to other programs for further processing --by 'easy' I mean without going into a whole export routine just to output a few entries, and ideally not having to do it one by one. In this respect I wonder whether a clip manager like ClipCache, mentiond by JohnK here http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/9997 would be a preferable solution.

Is it possible in CintaNotes to select, say, 4-5 consecutive (or not) entries and copy them to another program with a couple of clicks/keystrokes?

I was wrong about having to open textBEAST first before you can copy anything. Should have read the documentation more thoroughly.

textBEAST is a really nice app. It has its own clipboard so everything you copy with CTL-C or CTL-X in any other program ends up in the textBEAST clipboard automatically. You can open the clipboard later and move (with a double pane view) each copied item into one of ten different "libraries" which act like folders. I'm still going through everything, but it looks like each "library" has nine "pages," each of which can hold 20 copied items, so each library or folder can hold 180 items and the whole clipboard manager can save 1800 items.

I haven't gone through everything yet, but it looks like there are keyboard shortcuts for all the basic operations. The more I use textBEAST, the more I like it. Haven't run into any bugs so far. It seems pretty solid.

textBEAST has one minor feature that I like a lot. When you move your mouse over a saved item, you get a popup balloon explaining the keyboard shortcuts you can use. Another thing I like about the program is the fact that it runs in the background (like CintaNotes) so you never have to actually open the application to save text. The copy operations are all invisible.

Overall, this is a fantastic little productivity application. I copy a lot of text snippets--excerpts from manuscripts, research articles, news stories, etc., etc.--and now I don't have to worry about pasting those snippets into OneNote or Word or whatever right after I've copied them to the clipboard. I can go through them later in textBEAST and decide what to do with them.

"The idea of a ready-and-waiting inbox sounds very interesting, but I can see a certain conflict with my current setup: Ctrl-F12 is used in Surfulater to create a new folder, and cannot be re-assigned. Is it possible to change the hotkey in CintaNotes?"

Yes, you can change all the hot keys in CintaNotes. I had to change the default "Add New Note" hot key because it conflicted with another program I'm using. It's easy to do.

"Is it possible in CintaNotes to select, say, 4-5 consecutive (or not) entries and copy them to another program with a couple of clicks/keystrokes?"

I'm not sure about this. I tried using CTL-CLICK and SHIFT-CLICK to select two or three consecutive/non-consecutive notes, but it didn't work. There may be another key combination, however, so don't take my word for it. I couldn't figure out how to do it in textBEAST either, but I'm still learning how to use the app.

Now that I've had a chance to play around with it for a while, I'm really impressed with textBEAST. I'm going to use it as a holding area for information that will eventually get moved elsewhere or maybe deleted after I read back through it again.

CintaNotes can also be used as a clipboard manager. Highlight some text you want to copy and use the clip text hot key (default CTL-F12) and you end up with a note in CintaNotes that can be tagged for searching later. CintaNotes presents you with a sortable list of notes and textBEAST, I think, offers more tools for organization. One nice thing about CintaNotes is that you can call up a simple note editor with one keyboard command, write a note, then save it with CTL-ENTER while CintaNotes is running in the background. Very useful. I don't think you can do this in textBEAST, but I might be wrong.

textBEAST has the ability to do screen captures and view them later. It has a lot of other features like password protection, but I haven't figured out how to use them yet.

Greetings to all,

TextBeast looks quite slick. Can anyone tell me whether it is capable of capturing any metadata for a given clip? I.e., the URL of the source page for a clip or--my personal Holy Grail--the path+name of a source file?

Cheers,
critStock

I don't think textBEAST saves any metadata.

Just experimenting with Cintanotes a little. I was able to select multiple notes in Cintanotes, consecutive or non-consecutive, using the usual methods. I tried a Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V into Notepad - it pasted only the text of the notes. But you can also do a File / Export to a text file - and the resulting text file contains each note - not just the text of the note but also a date/time stamp and the source URL. Hope this helps.

i should have clarified - when you do a Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V in Cintanotes - the text of the selected notes gets pasted. If you do a File/Export, you can select whether you want to export all notes or just selected notes. You can also use hot keys - F11 exports selected notes, Ctrl-F11 exports all notes.

critStock wrote:

Can anyone tell me whether it is
capable of capturing any metadata for a given clip? I.e., the URL of the source page for
a clip or--my personal Holy Grail--the path+name of a source file?

ClipCache, which I am now using again after ages, captures the following: source program, source URL (http:// for web clippings, file://path for copied files) and source window title. The latter may include info on the actual source file depending on the program; for example, PSPad (a notepad replacement) provides the full path to the files I clipped text from; Word only provides the name of the file, but not the path.