A Few New Mac Tools


I found a couple of new tools for my Mac this week that I like pretty well: iClip and BluePhoneMenu

The first is a handy clipboard tool called iClip. I frequently copy multiple items that I want to paste back into another document. With a multi-bin clipboard, you can do all of your cutting at once and then paste them in in another document without flipping back and forth. I was using Copy-Paste-X, but it has some funny behavior in menus that I didn't like. iClip is also a little more visual. I like how it works. (Cost: $19.95)

The second tool is only useful if you have a Bluetooth phone. After reading my post from yesterday about my new T637 Colin Kelly (from the award winning Connect Magazine) sent me a tip about BluePhoneMenu. BluePhoneMenu puts an icon in the menu bar that reads information from your Bluetooth phone. When a call comes in on my phone, the app flashes the caller ID info in the screen and pauses iTunes automatically. It also creates a log of calls on my machine and lets me select from the log to return a call or send an SMS message. Very handy.

As I was thinking about how handy having BLuetooth connectivity to my phone is, I was wondering why there are no land-line phones with Bluetooth. Afterall, I'd like use Address Book or BluePhoneMenu to drive the phone in my home office or the Cisco VoIP phone at BYU. Just adding Bluetooth to these devices would instantly give them a standards compliant, wireless interface to my computer. That's pretty simple and cheap convergence. There seem to be a few products in that space, but its hard to tell exactly how they'd work.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:21 2019.