ClipStation is an attempt at uniting the Drag Manager with the Clipboard. Drag-and-drop is a cool new way of moving data between applications, but not everybody supports it yet. Hence, you can use ClipStation as a “way station” between drag-and-drop and old-style cut/copy/paste.
When ClipStation is frontmost, it displays a window, showing the current contents of the Clipboard. You can drag a Finder clipping file into this window, and it will be copied to the Clipboard. You can then switch to a non-drag-savvy application, and paste it in there.
You can also copy something to the Clipboard, then bring ClipStation to the front, and drag the clipboard contents out of its window into another drag-savvy application (or Finder clipping file).
ClipStation is scriptable and recordable. It also supports QuickTime and QuickDraw GX. If you have a sound or movie on the Clipboard, you can click in ClipStation’s window to play it. It will also display a QuickDraw GX graphic on the Clipboard, and let you zoom it in and out for a better look: hold down command and space and click to zoom in, hold down command, option and space and click to zoom out, or click without holding any keys down to restore the scale to 100%.
• Limitations:
ClipStation only displays its window while it is frontmost. This is because it cannot validly display or modify the Clipboard contents while in the background. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to drag data to ClipStation from most applications, as the only application that is currently capable of starting a drag without coming to the front is the Finder.
• Development history:
Z-1.0d3 1994 October 13 — first public release.
Z-1.0d4 1995 January 9 — fixed improper positioning of QuickDraw GX picture shapes, and inability to open old-style clipboard files.
Z-1.0d5 1995 April 18—changed the way the scrap is loaded. I had previously been loading the scrap into the system heap, but it turned out the Scrap Manager still incorrectly checks the free space in the application heap regardless, and would give up if there was too little space there. It should now be possible to deal with large scrap items without increasing the application partition size.
Z-1.0d6 1995 May 28—deal better with infinite-sized QuickDraw GX shapes, and work around what looks like a bug in UnloadScrap, occasionally not clearing ScrapState.
Z-1.1d1 1995 June 3—added new AppleScript functions to read and write clipping files directly, without touching the Clipboard.
