SmartBoard


SmartBoard is a "Clipboard Extender" for Windows. The normal Windows Clipboard can only retain a single item at a time - as soon as you copy a second item on to the Clipboard you lose the first one. With SmartBoard running that is no longer true, SmartBoard retains multiple "Clip Items", even across a Windows restart, and allows simple pasting back of any of them into any application.

SmartBoard runs as an invisible task in Windows - there is no icon cluttering up your desktop - but a single mouse-click or hot-key press pops SmartBoard up on top of your current application allowing you to select the "Clip Item" you want to paste, and then disappears out of the way again having pasted it into the current application automatically - you don't normally even need to use the application's paste command. Using Smartboard is a complete no-brainer, you just pop it into your Start-up group and forget it until you need it. It appears almost "built-in" to the operating system itself.

SmartBoard supports all clipboard formats, and allows you to configure it in exactly the way that works for you. You can specify what clipboard formats to capture, from what programs, limit captures to items under a specific size and specify preferred formats from particular programs. For example you could specify that you want to capture both Rich Text Format and plain Text from Microsoft Word, and the Lotus compatible XL1 format from Microsoft Excel, but only if it is less than 50K in size.

The modern interface looks much like File Manager or the Win95 Explorer, with a set of user-definable categories down the left side, and the content of the currently selected category on the right. In the case of text items the first few characters are shown, Bitmaps and Metafiles show as thumbnails and other data gives capture details.

You can assign nicknames to any of the items to help identification, and you can "zoom-in" on an item for a closer look by right-clicking. Zooming in on text presents a pop-up window showing the first few lines complete with formatting (tabs/line breaks etc.), zooming in on graphics shows them full-size. A unique "plug-in viewer" interface allows the development of zoom-in capability for any other Clipboard format, and we supply a sample which plays any wave files that have been captured from the Clipboard. The interface is open and we supply sample source-code to help other developers.

A system-wide hot-key facility allows you to associate a key combination with a particular item, then whenever you press the key combination the associated item is automatically pasted into the current application.

You can move items around between categories using Drag 'n Drop, and append multiple text items together. Items can be edited, printed or copied to file. In the case of Text items a "template" capability allows the user to create "boilerplate" items with variable fields that can either be updated automatically (dates/times etc.) or by the user specifying the required replacement data via a dialog box at paste time.

All the usual elements of a modern Windows application, such as toolbars, fly-by and context sensitive help are included making SmartBoard easy to use.