iQ-Notes: Freeware Sticky Notes And More

 Software Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 172012
 

iQ-Notes (Version: 5.07 as of this post) is a freeware sticky notes program that has features that make it a good and fully capable notes taking one. It can create unlimited number of notes – and with a recent new feature up to 12 tabs inside each individual note.

iQ-Notes

iQ-Notes can back up and restore notes to and from an external source. Notes can be associated with a sound, each have their own colors and transparency, synchronized to a FTP server and sent encrypted over a network with a passphrase or password shared between the end users. A built-in clipboard manager can hold items and categorize items into URLs, email, IM and time based ones. Each clipboard item can then be saved as a note or made into a favorte clipboard item to remain there forever. iQ-Notes also features configurable hot keys for creating new notes, finding notes and hiding or unhiding all notes. It also keeps backups – daily – of all the data and has a built-in rollback feature to restore a backup.

A new note is created via the tray icon or hot key and configured using the menu bar and drop down arrow to the top right of it. Colors, subject, title, alarm, tabs and password protection are just some of the available options. Furthermore each note can send and receive text from the clipboard, printed, emailed, saved as a text file, used as a contact list or expense entry and attached to a program window.

iQ-Notes

iQ-Notes also has a manage notes option which categorizes notes by date, changed date, subject and more. This window (see image above) includes a global search.

iQ-Notes works on Windows 2000 and newer.

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Ethervane Echo: Multi-Featured Clipboard Manager

 Software Reviews  4 Responses »
Dec 312011
 

Ethervane Echo is a full featured ‘keyboard centric’ clipboard extender or manager for Windows. It divides captured clipboard items into different categories based primarily on time captured and type, for example last hour and URLs and it can be tweaked for more advanced use. It does and should work when copying from most any source but it does not support images.

The Win+Insert (can be changed in the Preferences (Tool—>Preferences—>Keyboard)) keys are the default way of bringing up the program and Esc the default way to minimize it back to the tray.

Ethervane Echo
Ethervane Echo’s interface is divided into views, these views can be hidden or others added (View —> Manage Quick Views). The intended features and strengths are to find the items after they have been captured using the keyboard and search (with wild card support). A good example of Ethervane Echo’s ease of use is that when the program is brought up just typing starts a search, there is no need to click in the search box, and if required pressing Esc clears the search box. The search box has basic and advanced modes, the former is search as you type and the latter requires pressing enter to start the search.

The interface tries to give as much information as it can by showing the source, time of capture, size and type of a highlighted item and information on the total number of items in its database. Ethervane Echo has a status indicator – the little green check mark on the bottom of the interface – and it can be paused to not capture clipboard items by double clicking on that same icon.

The basic usage uses the usual Ctrl+C keys for copying and then maximizing the program, choosing a clip using the arrow keys and then pressing Enter to paste the chosen – or even multiple clips – into the active window. Right clicking on each clip presents copy, pasting and editing options as well.

An item can be made sticky to remain in the database forever, this can done via the right click menu, Ctrl+S or the Edit menu.

Ethervane Echo
The Database Maintenance section of the Preferences is important because here one can edit the program’s purging or automatic deleting schedule.

Among other features Ethervane Echo is also capable of holding items in memory instead of on disk for privacy reasons (Preferences—>Database). It supports ignoring clips like those captured within an interval (Preferences—>Capturing Clips) of the last capture, from certain programs  (Preferences—>Application Filter), duplicates and passwords.  Setting minimum and maximum item lengths are also set in the Capturing Clips section.

See the Keyboard Reference section of the help (or Shift+F1) for all available shortcuts. Ethervane Echo can import items from a text file or a Ditto clipboard database (Tools —> Import Clips). Ethervane Echo has been released as part of DonationCoder’s 2012 N.A.N.Y. (New Apps For The New Year) challenge, requires XP and newer and is available in both portable and installer versions.

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Freeware Shorts: M8 Free Clipboard

 Software Reviews  No Responses »
Dec 012011
 

M8 Free Clipboard (Version: 16.12.1 as of this post) is a clipboard enhancement program that also captures images. It can hold up to 25 clipboard items. Hovering over any item pops up a preview (see image). Items can be dragged or copied to the right hand – white – cells to be kept permanently and not be lost when the 26th item is added. There is more than one way of re-using an item. One is to maximize the program and click on the item, when it will be automatically pasted to the active window, another is to assign hot keys via the preferences.

M8 Free Clipboard

Items in the permanent area can be renamed, sorted A-Z and highlighted to ease later use. Both text and graphic items can be edited (via right click). The text tools available are making upper case, removing blank lines, HTML, leading spaces and more. The image tools include adding text, shapes, lines, resize (including increase!), crop, clip art, overlay with other image and more. There are several sheets that at first seem to make M8 hold more clipboard items but that doesn’t seem the case with each being a different view, certainly confusing. The program has two options menus (via Tools menu), one controls the aforementioned views with settings like ‘keep on top’ and others (see image) and another general one with settings for start with windows, start minimized, hot key activation, remind when clipboard full, screen edge activation, delays in bulk pasting, image pasting options – numbered methods that paste images reduced in size or not, supposedly dependent on the program the image is being pasted into but I could not see a difference in tests -  and many more. Other features or extras include Pictures —> Browse Picture Clips on this Sheet that turns M8 into a sort of image viewer and also a calendar (Tools —>Year Planner) where items can be added via right click and edit.

M8 Free Clipboard

M8 Free Clipboard does not win any ‘intuitive’ awards, and needs a look through the local help file (Help —> Main Help Index) to make some sense but is nevertheless useful as a clipboard program and should run on most Windows versions.

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Freeware Shorts: Keepboard (Cross Platform Clipboard Manager)

 Software Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 222011
 

Keepboard (Version: 2.1 as of this post) is a simple, light weight clipboard manager. It supports both text and images. Unzip the 1.5MB download and double click on the Start.vbs file to run the program.

Keepboard

Using the default Ctrl + C keys Keepboard collects items and keeps them in Clipboard History, clicking on an item presents a preview which is most useful in the case of image items. To further ease of use Keepboard can save items to groups and keep up to 2000 items in each group. Right click on any item to send it to a group, existing or create a new group on the fly, then using the Saved Items tab view those permanently organized. Within the saved items each item can be named as well. Right click, choose Open selected item, type a name and click OK. Later you can narrow down or filter all saved items by choosing a group and typing in the Name field to find items as you type (see images).

Keepboard

Keepboard can be paused to not collect any clipboard content via its Clipboard menu. It is cross platform (runs on Linux and Windows machines) and requires Java.

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Freeware Shorts: PasteCopy.NET

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Sep 212011
 

PasteCopy.NET (version: 0.9.8.10 as of this post) is a freeware and portable clipboard manager. Much like other clipboard utilities it expands the capabilities of Windows’ own clipboard.

PasteCopy.NET

PasteCopy.NET can handle rich text, html, comma separated values and images in additions to the usual plain text. Different clipboards or items can be assigned to categories so that reusing them is made easier. PasteCopy.NET also provides easy preview of clips via its system tray, just hover over the program icon, or within the program window itself. The size of the preview – number of lines or letters shown – is configurable. It also recognizes URLs and can provides full or  re-sized previews of the images stored in the clipboard.

Among its features is the ability to convert rtf and html clips to text before pasting them. It can also copy text automatically without the usual Ctrl-C keys if “Auto-copy on keyboard navigation” is enabled in the program settings (via the Preferences tab of its Settings which resides under the Options menu).

PasteCopy.NET weighs in at less than 1 MB, requires the .NET framework on host systems and should run on most Windows versions.

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Clipboard Master: Freeware Clipboard Enhancement

 Software Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 222010
 

Clipboard Master

Clipboard Master is a freeware Windows clipboard utility that enhances and makes copying and pasting more useful. Instead of the native Windows’ one clipboard item at a time Clipboard Master can hold up to 10,000 items, including images, and with a few key strokes paste them into any active application or program window. It uses the Windows + v keys to show a list of clipboard items it is holding, each identified by a number. For example to paste the 4th item into an active window press the Windows + v keys plus the 4 key (or alternatively use the mouse method, ie left click the program’s tray icon and navigate to the required clipboard and click on it). It can retain formatting or not when pasting text, the toggle being holding or not holding the Ctrl button when using either the keyboard or mouse methods just described.

Clipboard Master comes with a set of extra tools to insert date, remove spaces – clicking on a clipboard item presents this and other ‘convert’ features – and create folders to keep any number of clipboard items together as a related group. It also has what it calls collections, here when successive Ctrl + c clicks are done quickly – less than five seconds in between each by default – they can be added to one collection and pasted altogether using the Win + Alt + F1 keys or via the program’s tray icon.

Note that as of this review Clipboard Master is in beta (version 0.9.7) which will expire “3/2011″ and therefore is not fully complete and some features like creating folders and exclusion rules (in the program’s settings) seem to either be buggy or not ready yet. Clipboard Master runs on Windows 2000 and newer versions including 64 bit ones.

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Freeware Quick Cliq Is An Innovative Launcher And More

 Software Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 232010
 

Quick Cliq, packed into a single executable, is an interesting launcher and productivity tool. It incorporates launching files, folders, URLs and emails with an enhanced clipboard utility and the ability to keep text snippets as memos. It also supports a number of Windows manipulation features.

The program interface is launched by choosing the Add/Change item via its tray icon or via – the configurable – Win+Z keys. The options for configuring hot keys and mouse gestures are found under the settings menu. Other settings include enabling features such memos and setting colors and such things as adding the program to the Windows context menu.

The program is divided into four main sections or features each launched in it own configurable way. They are described below.

Accessing the Main menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse down or the aforementioned Win+Z if using the keyboard. Here you can create quick launches by adding folders, files, URLs, and email addresses in a sort of a list that will then be available for using the same mouse gesture or key combination.

Windows menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse right or Win+C keys. The Windows menus allows you to hide or show windows and a few others settings like choosing to keep a window on top. When windows are hidden any one of them can be previewed by hovering over their name in the windows list while pressing the Ctrl key.

Memos menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse left or Win+A keys. Add as many memos as you need and then send them to clipboard or automatically add them to the current open window.

Clips menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse up or Win+X keys. This is where the program is on the innovative side of things. In addition to holding up to nine clipboard items it is possible to append or add data to any one of the existing clips. As the tutorial video on the developer site shows suppose a user needs to copy only certain paragraphs from a long page or text into a new clip. Using Quick Cliq instead of repeatedly selecting the text and then pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V while going back and forth between the long text and the new clip or document the user can press Ctrl+1 (the 1 represents the numbered clip item so it could be any of 1 to 9) to copy and then press Alt+1 to paste, all without leaving the original long page or text. Then to append or add to the clip (clip 1 in this example) other text can be selected and added to that clip or document simply and only by pressing Ctrl+Win+1.

Quick Cliq is in active development and in addition to the video tutorials it is also a good idea to follow the developer blog. It requires Windows XP as a minimum.

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ClipCube: Young And Easy Freeware Clipboard Utility

 Software Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 142010
 

ClipCube, until very recently known as Clipbox, is a small and minimalist clipboard utility that keeps an unlimited (?), until recently up to 2000, number of clipboard items for future use. The program runs in the system tray. ClipCube lets the user decide how long it keeps clipboards on file, this is set by right clicking the program icon and choosing the Keep Items entry. The available options are keeping the item(s) until the program is exited to keeping them indefinitely. The program window or interface has settings for pinning or keeping it on top and also choosing to show a full preview of a selected clipboard item or not (by toggling the eye icon on or off). One other option is showing a time stamp beside each clipboard item, this lets a user know when the clipboard was captured.

ClipCube also supports hotkeys (see http://clipcube.wikispaces.com/Changelogs for a full list of hotkeys as they are added to each version) that ease program usage such as Enter+Ctrl+C to copy a selected clipboard item and Ctrl+Numpad[1-9]  to choose the first to ninth entry in the listed clipboard history. The latter did not work in my test of the current version (0.2.2) and additionally brings up the question of how one may be able to choose the 10th, 11th or higher numbered items in the clipboard history list.

ClipCube is GPL licensed software and does not require installation. This program is in development and the interface and options have also changed recently so this review may be outdated in some respects by the time you read it.

 Posted by RG  Tagged with: , , , ,

TyperTask: Tiny System Automation

 Software Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 172010
 

TyperTask is a small freeware executable that automates many common tasks. The most notable and perhaps immediately useful feature of TyperTask is that in can expand text. Often typed or repeated phrases can be automated with fewer typed letters. As a simple example one can define the “~hth” abbreviation for “Hope this helps!” (see image) saving several key strokes. This is what the program calls a Trigger. Any number of triggers can be defined and saved one per line in the program interface. The other example in the image is a trigger for an email signature. Triggers can be used to correct common misspellings by adding a trigger like “recieve=receive” and also auto completing single words like “compl=completely”

TyperTask does more than just simple text triggers and can act as a launcher with such definitions or triggers as “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}G=RUN: http://www.google.com”, where special or non-alphanumeric keys are sorrounded by {}. TyperTask also supports delays like “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}N=RUN: notepad.exe{Delay=1000}Hello! {Delay=500}World!”, here notepad is opened and the text typed in it after the specified delay (in milliseconds). This can be useful when one wants to make sure an operation (a fully loaded notepad in this case) is completed before doing anything else. The WINDOW operator brings an already open window in front or into focus, for example “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}C=WINDOW: Calculator” brings the calculator into focus. Mouse clicks are also supported, this is perhaps most useful if one wants to use a program but make sure the mouse is clicked inside of it so that its Window is activated.

A more thorough explanation is given in TyperTask’s help file (accessed via the Help menu) which includes a list of special key codes and other features such as the support for environment variables (%TEMP% for system’s temporary files folder for example) and the Remove Clipboard Formatting feature.

One notable example from the help file is very interesting for those who write (HTML) code manually. “<b=<b></b>{left}{left}{left}{left}”,  here the bold tags are completed faster and automatically but furthermore the cursor returns to in between the HTML tags ready to type the bold to be text.

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XPad: Lightweight, No Install Text Editor

 Software Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 132010
 

XPad is a text editor with a compact interface and a good number of extra tools. The program can be run right after download with no need for an installation. The program’s menu surrounds its interface (see image).

The left hand side icons or menu are the usual New, Open File, Save, Save As, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete (the selected text), Find, Search Again, Replace and About. Of course all the usual keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl+P, Ctrl+S, etc. – apply as well.

The right hand side icons or menu is where the XPad extras can be found, they are as follows:

  • Word Wrap
  • Automatic Copy Selection To Keyboard
  • Multiple Clipboard, if activated or pressed it will hold a configurable number of clipboard items that are automatically pasted when they are highlighted or chosen from the generated list
  • Open system’s font selector
  • Text format, set any of Windows, Mac, UTF-16, Arabic Characters and many more for the text document
  • Filters for such tasks as removing spaces, converting HTML to text, converting tabs to spaces and more
  • Encode and decode Base64, UTF-8
  • Clean or remove clipboard content
  • Delete file securely
  • Open another instance of XPad
  • Open system calculator
  • Send current text as email, in my test the text was automatically copied to the email subject line with nothing in the body
  • Open (default) browser, if a URL is highlighted it will be loaded otherwise a blank browser window opens
  • Open an instance of Windows Explorer
  • Keep XPad on top, click the pin icon

    The final icon is for XPad’s configuration options. In it one can create a shortcut icon for the program, associate it with *.txt files (so all *.txt files open with XPad instead of Notepad or other system default text editor), remember last opened files and/or directory and the aforementioned multiple clipboard option. There is also a Window with a list of XPad’s hotkeys or shortcuts (see image).

    XPad is just over 1MB, it is only one single *.exe file (and one *.ini file to hold its settings) and should run on all Windows versions.

     Posted by RG  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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