Chris Hannah
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Put Your Pasteboard in Your Menu Bar With ClipBar

ClipBar, an app made by my friend Cesare, is a recently released app that puts your pasteboard in your menu bar. It's such a simple idea, but it's already helped me a ton.

I haven't got a great memory, so I regularly forget what I've copied. Previously, I would hit CMD + SPACE, paste the contents into Spotlight and get a preview. But with ClipBar, I've always got a snippet in the menu bar that makes it much faster.

There's no need to worry about the size of the pasteboard either, since you can set a maximum character limit that will appear. You can also fine-tune the truncation, by having it clip the start, middle, or end of the content.

If you've simply copied text, then that's what will appear. However, if you've copied a file, then you'll see the path, and if you've copied an image, you will see an icon to show it is an image, and it's file size.

In a recent update, ClipBar gained a preview feature, so you can view the whole contents of your clipboard. For images, it switches from the file size to an actual preview of the image.

From the preview, you can share the contents using any built-in or third-party share extensions.

Having your pasteboard contents permanently in your menu bar can sound potentially dangerous, especially if you regularly copy sensitive information. Unfortunately, if you are worried about such problems, then this app may not be for you.

But ClipBar does work with an existing agreement between developers to help identify when passwords and other secure information has been copied, and it will then attempt to conceal the data. You can read more details on this in the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

While I may copy sensitive information on my machine, I'm happy with the fact that ClipBar is sandboxed, it doesn't store your data anywhere, and the precautions regarding sensitive information.

With all that said, I think ClipBar is a great app, and one that will undoubtedly make your life easier.

You can download ClipBar on the Mac App Store.

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