Useful third-party Clipboard apps
Copied £5.99 copiedapp.com
The basics of Copied more or less mirror what you find in Universal Clipboard, albeit with support for older versions of Apple’s operating systems (starting with iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite).
Once you enable Copied’s iCloud Sync feature, you can copy and paste things between your Macs and iOS devices. However, Copied goes beyond the capabilities of Apple’s system by providing access to a much richer range of features: a Clipboard history to access things copied in the past; editable clippings, templates enable clippings to be pasted with specific formatting; and batch operations, which enable you to select and merge clippings, or add them to stored lists.
Paste £7.99 pastea pp.me
At its core, this app is a smart Clipboard history and clippings manager. It claims to store “everything you’ve ever copied”, and enables you to later search for and retrieve important clippings so you can reuse them.
Paste enables you to define rules that exclude specific apps, and create pinboards for regularly required clippings. Often, pinboard slots offer a suitably chunky preview, so you can quickly pick out a particular clipping at a glance; Quick Look is always available for a closer look. At the time of writing, clipboards can be shared with friends and sent over AirDrop; cross-device support is in the works, with Paste for iOS coming soon.
Alfre d + Po wer pac k £17 alfre dapp.com
Although it isn’t technically a Clipboard manager, this app, once its £17 Powerpack add-on is installed and activated, has a Clipboard history feature. Alfred’s settings are usefully granular: you can define how long it should keep various kinds of clipping, such as plain text, images and file lists, with durations going from 24 hours to three months.
When you open Alfred’s Clipboard History viewer, you can scroll through clippings, or filter its contents by typing a word or phrase. Alfred’s more advanced features include the ability to append the currently selected item to previously copied text in Clipboard History, and automatic pasting of your selection into an app upon pressing