by Beverly Rosenbaum
The Shareware Industry Foundation recently announced its selections for 1997 Shareware Industry Awards. Chosen as Best Utility was Thornsoft Development’s ClipMate, a Windows clipboard enhancement that allows movement of a series of items, which can be saved for later use.
Rather than working with one piece of clipboard data at a time, ClipMate enhances the native clipboard functionality of Windows by remembering all items (both text and graphic) that are copied to the clipboard and storing them in “collections” for later pasting.
ClipMate has powerful tools enabling users to retrieve, append, print, reformat, and edit data. An exclusive PowerPaste(TM) feature puts ClipMate in “rapid fire” mode, allowing quick pasting of a series of items into an application. New to version 4.5, C lipMate’s QuickPaste puts the most recently copied items, as well as “favorite” items, at your fingertips. The QuickMenu opens with a hotkey, the item can be selected, and it is inserted right where you were working. ClipMate was recently featured by PC Magazine as one of the Top Freeware/Shareware utilities, and Windows Sources Magazine included it in their list of “Net’s Best Free Software”. No newcomer to the scene, ClipMate was also ranked #29 among Win95 Magazine readers’ favorite shareware titles of 1996.
The ClipMate icon appears down in the toolbar in the lower right corner of your screen. Each saved clip is tagged with a format icon, for ASCII, Rich Text, bitmapped graphic or OLE. When ClipMate is active it only occupies a small corner of the screen an d, although it holds hundreds of clips, it hardly affects the system resources. An infinite number of clip collections can be managed any way you want: a collection that is useful in desktop publishing might store a company logo, symbol, em and en dashes , curly quotes and a few wingdings; or another might contain standard blurbs to use in form letters. Each collection has its own icon in an unobtrusive scroll bar, and can be kept indefinitely.
A nice feature is carriage return removal, an invaluable tool for processing ASCII documents that have hard breaks inserted at the end of every line. ClipMate’s tips include how to store a facsimile signature to insert into your FAX documents. When you u se your Print Scrn key to make screen captures, ClipMate will automatically resize them to print a full page instead of printing a postage stamp size. Clip collections containing data such as e-mail addresses or phone numbers can even be shared with othe r computers.
ClipMate is easy to install and the help file is excellent, with an option to activate tips of the day to learn the subtleties of the program. It costs $25 to register or $10 to upgrade an older version. The shareware version will run for 30 days or 30 u ses, after which you will get nag screens and some of the advanced features will be disabled.
ClipMate is available in versions for Win 3.1 and Win 95 on the Internet at http://www.thornsoft.com, on the HAL-PC BBS, or directly from Thornton Software Solutions, 155 Southridge Dr., Rochester, NY 14626, (716) 227-6505. Both versions and a printed ma nual are included with the registered software.
Selected as the Most Innovative New Product was Mijenix Corporation’s Zip Magic, a utility which safely and transparently shows zip files as normal Windows folders. The contents of zip files you download, receive or create become instantly accessible, so you can view and modify files, run programs, and archive files, all without ha ving to unzip anything. And every file stays compressed in the zipfile, saving disk space. With ZipMagic, you can immediately use zip files from the Windows Explorer or File Manager.
You can modify files in the zip archive without having to unzip them, run programs inside of zip files, access zip file contents from any Windows program, display zip files as folders or as files, or access files in Zip from Open and Save As dialogs.
ZipMagic fully supports the universal ZIP format, as well as other compressed files like ARJ, LHA/LZH, Z, GZIP, TAR, TAZ, CAB and ZOO. You can also open and decode e-mail attachments like BinHex, UUEncode, XXEncode and MIME.
The Archive Manager component gives you the option to place large zip files onto multiple disks (“spanning”); create self-extracting zip executables for DOS, 16-bit Windows 3.1, or 32-bit Windows 95 & NT; password protect files; drag and drop; and get fu ll compatibility with all standard zip formats. The Archive Manager also includes extensive file and disk management with integrated file viewing. However, the many built-in viewers require the Win95 Quickview libraries found on the Win 95 CD, or availab le free from Mijenix or Microsoft.
The program also repairs damaged zip files; has selectable compression ratios: Maximum, Normal, Fast, Super Fast, and no compression (store only); can recurse directories, store paths, and support long and short (8.3) filenames; and create and edit zip c omments. ZipMagic is the first zip utility with automatic updating via the Internet, which seamlessly updates your copy of ZipMagic to the latest maintenance release. This program is available for Win 95 and 3.1 from http://www.mijenix.com or the HAL-PC BBS. The registered version is $39.95, or a $14.95 upgrade from ZipFolders, plus shipping and handling.
Order online or direct from Mijenix Corporation, 6666 Odana Road, Suite 122, Madison WI 53719, 1-800-MIJENIX (1-800-645-3649) or 608/277-1981. Both versions (Windows 3.1x and Windows 95) are included when you purchase ZipMagic.
CAUTION: If you have installed Corel’s WordPerfect Suite 8 and the version control feature, ANY file that you right click on will be deleted as well as the ZIP file you are trying to create.
Current [9-97] shipments of WordPefect Suite 8 have corrected this problem.
Beverly Rosenbaum is a HAL-PC member and can be contacted at brosen@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.