New Popularity

For many years, Rename Master has been the number one downloaded program on this site. It used to be downloaded twice as much as the second most popular program, ArsClip. In the past few weeks, ArsClip has been downloaded much more than usual.

My theory is that a clipboard manager is the top program that most people don't know they need. Word of mouth seems to be how people discover a clipboard manager. What has happened recently is that the top Google hit for "clipboard manager" now brings up a 5 year old article discussing the top programs in this category - which includes ArsClip. It is funny how much the program has changed since.

Last Updates for 2013

Both ArsClip and Rename Master have new official releases this month. Rename Master's release is almost purely a bug-fix release. ArsClip's release features tweaks to the Clipboard Bar, some new configuration options, and quite a few fixes.

ArsClip Update

Version 4.13 of ArsClip has been officially released. Beside bug fixes, the focus of this release was on two items: the Clipboard Bar and the clip file format.

The Clipboard Bar has been updated to be a mouse-friendly control. Besides displaying the current clipboard, it now also acts as a drag-and-drop target, a popup trigger, and a clipboard manager. For drag-and-drop support, clips can be dragged to be pasted as text, clips can be dragged to a file manager to create a new file, and text/richtext clips can be dragged onto the Clipboard Bar to paste the file contents onto the clipboard. The new Toolbar for the Clipboard Bar is a centralized location for clipboard management. The current clip can be shown in an editor, altered, and/or made into a Permanent Clip.

The old clip file format was showing growing pains. Over the years, the way clips have been stored has changed drastically. For compatibility, new features usually required a new file to store new data. It could require seven different files just to load a single clips. The new clip format uses a single file to store all the data associated with a clip. The end result is simplicity and efficiency.

RSS Feeds Updated

There was a small change to the RSS feeds to work around issues with some readers. Although the feed was completely valid, a few utilities didn't process them correctly without an optional field.

Also, many pages now have a "Subscribe to this page" link. The main feed announces changes on the entire site, but these feeds only announce changes for a single page.

A Quick Update for ArsClip

Version 4.11 of ArsClip has been officially released. The major focus of this build was to improve the visuals of the popup clip. The goal was to make it look better and improve usability. A lot of work has been done for color compatibility. To show of the improvement, I've added some example color schemes to choose from. Many, many small changes have also been made for usability. For example. hovering a clip icon will now change the graphic to signify it's function.

For keyboard users, the popup now has enhanced shortcut keys. These keys will automatically appear on submenus menus when accessed via keystrokes. Before, only the arrow keys could be used for keyboard navigation.