PTHPasteboard Alternatives For Snow Leopard: Clipboard Evolved & Jumpcut

I’ve been using PTHPasteboard as my clipboard manager in Leopard for quite some time. I never really liked it, it didn’t feel “Mac like”. It was a combination of it’s visual appearance when you needed to retrieve something from your clipboard and also the settings – it just didn’t feel Mac’ish, you know?

But I used it since it did was it was supposed to and it even kept the formatting for saved clips, which was pretty cool. It was free, too.

Then came Snow Leopard and PTHPasteboard now wants to be updated to 4.5.0 and requires a PRO license to work under Snow Leopard. Such a license is $24.95 and I’m not that copy & paste happy that I want to pay 25 bucks just to be able to retrieve older clips. I’m sure PTHPasteboard offers other features than that, worth paying for, but I only used PTHPasteboard for its clipboard management skills.

I went searching for alternatives and I didn’t come up with many – but I found a few: Clipboard Evolved and Jumpcut. Both are acceptable PTHPasteboard alternatives so let’s have a look at some of their features.

Clipboard Evolved 2

This is the pretty alternative with lots of eye candy and advanced features.

Clipboard Evolved is the award winning clipboard manager for Mac OS X. Featuring unparalleled ease of use, stunning interface design, and offering hundreds of ways to get to your data; Clipboard Evolved makes it fun and easy to manage all your important data. Clipboard Evolved features a clipboard-like window for managing clips, a menu bar icon, and now a cover-flow interface for quickly pasting clips; Clipboard Evolved brings the copy-paste paradigm into the twenty first century. Designed to fit neatly and unobtrusively in Mac OS X, it’s the perfect clipboard manager for Mac OS X.

It’s a $15 piece of software and works with Snow Leopard.

» Clipboard Evolved 2

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is the simple – and free – alternative to both PTHPasteboard and Clipboard Evolved 2. Jumpcut has not been updated since January 2009, but it is Snow Leopard compatible.

Jumpcut was begun in December 2002 as my first serious Cocoa project. PTHPasteboard, my preferred clipboard buffering application at the time, was being turned into a piece of commercial software, and none of the many shareware and freeware clipboard buffer programs I tried worked the way I wanted. My wife was even less satisfied with the options available than I was; some discussion revealed that the two of us had very clear ideas about the ways in which a clipboard buffer should just work.

Ironic, Jumpcut was born due to PTHPasteboard going commercial in 2002 – and now it takes over for PTHPasteboard as my favorite clipboard manager.

Jumpcut is so easy and simple to use – unfortunately it does not seem to keep the formatting, but it’s still better than only being able to store 1 “copy” in your clipboard.

You can either invoke Jumpcut by pressing CTRL+OPTION+V on your keyboard, that brings up a bezel you can scroll through:

Or you can simply click the Jumpcut icon in your menubar and select from your recent clippings:

» Jumpcut

Besides the two above mentioned alternatives, there’s also iClip which I believe came out back when we were still running Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). It’s a cool application but it’s said not to work with Snow Leopard, yet.