Storing Miscellanea in a Widget

If you’re like me, you have bits and pieces of information: dates, names, to-do lists…little things here and there that are so small that they’re not worth writing down because you’re positive you can just remember them. 30 seconds later you’ve forgotten it and are cursing yourself for not having jotted it down after all.

I have this problem with my computer, too. Files, email addresses, little images - things that I’m not going to need for very long, so it hardly seems worth opening and saving a document to keep them. Before I know it, I’ve lost track of whatever it was again and am stuck going back to where I saw it the first time to look at it again, copy it back to the clipboard, what have you.

One of my favorite ways to deal with little transient bits of information on my computer is with the free iClip Lite Widget from inventive. This widget is a miniature version of their full-blown iClip application.

Each well on the iClip Lite widget can be filled with a snippet of information you want to keep handy but don’t want to bother creating a new file just to save it. Pretty much anything that can be copied to the clipboard can be dropped here for temporary storage. Simply copy something to your clipboard (remember the Command-C keystroke from Monday?), open the Dashboard, and press the up arrow button on the iClip Lite well where you wish to store it. If you go back to the Dashboard later, you can press the blue down arrow to copy the contents of a well back to your clipboard. When you no longer need the information, you can press the circle with a slash button to empty the well.

Text and images dumped into a well will show up as snippets of themselves that can be copied back out later. Files and URLs show up as icons, and are a bit snazzier.

You can store quick access to a file in iClip Lite. Select the file in a Finder window, copy it, and pop it into a well. The file’s icon will appear inside the well. Now, if you double click on that well, the file will open. Pretty handy if you don’t want to navigate over and over to a file you use often.

URLs can be used the same way. You can copy a link and push it into an iClip Lite well. Later, you can either double click to open it in your browser or use the down arrow copy it back to your clipboard if you need to paste it somewhere else. It’s kind of like a temporary bookmark!

iClip Lite does have one last trick up its sleeve. If you click the large atomic-looking button on the left side, it will automatically record anything you copy to your clipboard into separate wells. This way, you can just highlight and copy several things in a row from one source, then go to a file you’d like to paste them and they’ll all be sitting in the Dashboard widget waiting for you.

If you’ve never installed a Dashboard Widget before, it’s pretty quick. For iClip Lite, you’d download it from the website linked above. It will either automatically run the installer, or you can double click the .zip file on your desktop to extract it. If the installer didn’t run automatically, then after extracting the .zip file you can double click the new widget icon on the desktop. Next, it will make sure that you really want to install it (this makes sure that no rogue widgets find their way onto your Dashboard). Once you select Install, it will open the Widget in Dashboard. You can preview it here, and the computer will ask you for clarification as to whether you want to keep the Widget or delete it. Once you click “keep,” you’re done!