Friday, January 13, 2017

For MacOS, PASTE is Out and PASTEBOT is In

PASTE is a highly-effective Clipboard manager for MacOS and I've used it for ages.  I don't recall the price but it was no more than five or ten dollars.

The need for a Clipboard manager may seem to dry and boring to many but it becomes important when you do as much bloggerizing as has been my wont.  There are many times when I want to copy the title, the URL, and probably some text from any given resource but I don't want to go back and forth three times to do it.

PASTE solved that problem handily and so it went for some while.


PASTEBOT was recruited as a competitor because it was low-cost as well and said to have more features.  I'm not sure when I got that one but I was leery at first of switching from the tried-and-true. Once I did switch, it was over instantly.  PASTEBOT takes the win.

This sort of function is so fundamental but every click is important for something you may repeat hundreds of times, maybe even in a day.  If you look at any science article on Ithaka, you will see examples of the Clipboard being used many times for links and excerpts from the source.  The function is important or even vital to me but it's still boring so I want it as transparent as the one from the government who says he's here to help.

The simple ability to quickly convert anything copied to plain text saves many keystrokes since Google butchers it when you import RTF and then remove the formatting.  With PASTEBOT, the Google step is no longer necessary.


A way you might use PASTEBOT is filling a selection of cells in a spreadsheet since it can paste in a sequence if you like.  Thankfully, I never need to screw around with spreadsheets anymore and I never again have to look at the insane equation language they use.  Of the many programming languages I have used over the years, that was the rock bottom worst.


Note:  I'll never recommend software unless it's compatible through to the current release of MacOS which is Sierra 10.12.2 at the moment.  They may not always support older versions but the recommendations will always support the current.

Take the recommendations as you will but I started with Apple so long ago I'm not even sure of the year but it must have been early Eighties and interest in micros in general had started in the Seventies.  The mainframe path has been consistent with IBM since the late Seventies except for some almost completely wasted time with Digital and those damnable µVAX ...

wow ... This: was actually spelled correctly and handled correctly using dictation - end of dictated part.

It was slow but I wanted to see if it could do it.  The slowness was because every translation was getting turned around at Apple.  A 1.8 GB download will speed that and eliminate the exposure of sending anything to Apple but maybe another time.  That has jiggled the curiosity a bit but I don't have a view of anything strongly useful in it.


Only a few of you will appreciate this one but one of the things they wanted me to do at the university was to install OS/VS1 because there was a library system for the uni library which wouldn't run on anything else.  This was in parallel with other responsibilities with MVS X/A.  Maybe you remember the t-shirts ... X/A EXPANDED MY PRIVATE AREA.  That was highly risque for IBM at the time but they were such rebels, weren't they.

Joe Morand in Cincinnati was the one with the t-shirts and he was one hell of a nice fellow.  I hope you're still in the game somewhere, Joe.  Hat tip and thanks for everything.

We didn't get to the beauty part with VS1 yet since no-one wanted to dedicate a mainframe to it so that meant bring VM into the picture as well.

Glory.

My colleague installed VM and had quite a good time with it while I had the ignominious task of installing VS1.  There was some coolness in it since that paid for junkets with their library team to various places and they wanted me around for systems support even when they only talked about what their applications were doing.

From systems, I don't care what their code is doing and it doesn't make any difference from that standpoint whether they make chocolate chip cookies or war plans.  That meant my only real job on these junkets was ensuring I packed sufficient reefer.  This was long before TSA, drug-sniffing dogs, or any of the things which turned airports into the last place on the planet anyone wants to be.


Ed:  what the hell does any of that have to do with MacOS?

Nothin' but this ain't MacWorld, mate.  It's somewhat related insofar as, given that experience, something I say about computers probably isn't bullshit.

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