Each clip drawer can contain any number of items. An item contains one or more format, where a format can be some text, a picture, an URL or email address, an alias, a script, a thumbnail, a sound, a movie, text styling or anything else. For example, dragging in some text from Microsoft Word 98 will create an item containing a picture, text, text styling and 7 other formats which only Word understands.

Creating items

Items can be created in many ways. The easiest is by using drag and drop from another application (almost all modern Mac applications now support this technology). You can also use the Paste command in the clip drawer’s contextual menu to paste in from the clipboard.

Another way to create a new item is to give the clip drawer a Key to Copy Selection into Drawer. Pressing this key will copy the selection from any Mac OS application and paste it into the drawer (see previous topic).

To create a new item from within Drop Drawers, use the Create Item submenu of the clip drawer’s contextual menu. You can create a new text item, URL or script in their respective editors, a new alias by selecting the file or folder to make the alias to or a new sound by recording.

Showing and removing formats

Although items can contain as many formats as required, only one format is displayed at a time (along with the item’s name for non-text items). To change the format to show, use the Show sub-menu of the item’s contextual menu (accessible by control-clicking).

To remove a format from an item, use the Remove sub-menu of the item’s contextual menu – items in this menu also show you how much space each of the item’s formats is taking up.

Selecting, moving, duplicating and resizing items

Items are selected in the same way as the Finder, with shift-clicking, rectangular selection and a Select All command in the clip drawer’s contextual menu. Items can be moved by dragging and duplicated by option-dragging. If the command key is down, the arrow keys will ‘nudge’ items by 1 pixel in the desired direction. Items can be resized by dragging the handles in the items’ corner - the item’s proportion will determine whether and where to show the item’s name (except items whose text is shown or which have no name).

Inserting items

Items can be inserted from a clip drawer into any Mac OS application using the Insert command in the item’s contextual menu. The item will be inserted as if it had been pasted in from the clipboard. This feature works by putting the data on the clipboard and sending a Command-V key press to the frontmost application. If the application does not interpret the Command-V key press correctly, it will not work with this feature of Drop Drawers.

Item Options

Each item in a clip drawer has some options which can be set in the Item Options window. To open this window, choose Item Options… from the item’s contextual menu. You can set the item’s name and assign shortcut keys to insert (within the frontmost application), open, show or edit the item. These keys will be interpreted sensibly depending on which format is showing for the item. You can also give any item a thumbnail, to be displayed with or without its name. Thumbnails can be copied in or out of the square area using drag and drop or the three buttons labelled Copy, Paste and Clear.