9 Comments

iClip 4 Sneak Peak

January 7, 2007 by in Apple,Downloadable with 9 Comments

Hi, I’m Jon and will be a guest contributing writer for UNEASYSilence for Macworld San Francisco 2007. Lets kick things off by reviewing a piece of software that is helpful to me on a daily basis and that offers much in the way of keeping track of clipboard clippings, iClip 4.

Having been a participant in MacHeist weeks ago, I had purchased a copy of this yet to be released software. I wondered why they had sent me the serial a month weeks in advance of the software’s rumored release at Macworld San Francisco this upcoming Tuesday. Maybe it was to tease me. Or it could have been some dastardly plot to make me run up their bandwidth bill by checking their site early and often. Suffice it to say the graphical interface enhancements made by famed ‘UI veteran’ Pitor Gajos drew me to towards the program as an enhancement of my currently running iClip3.

iClip lite, the dashboard widget, has been around for some time and sports many of the same enhancements that the new iClip4 was modeled after. iClip lite has such an impressive UI that it won a 2006 Apple Design Award under the category of Best Dashboard Widget. And Macworld magazine gave it 4 mice out of 5 in their review.

But now comes the fun part. I received an email form MacHeist advising me that the ‘sneak peek’ of iClip 4 was avalable to those who purchased it. I clicked on the link (not displayed with respect to the programmers and you would need a key anyways) and downloaded the ~12MB zip file. Upon opening the iClip application I was greeted with a nice splash window.

picture-12-custom.png

I then waited for some miraculous opening of the program, but just a beachball (and it was spinning) welcomed me. I then open up Activity Monitor to see what the deal was and I got the following.

picture-1.png

To my dismay, iClip4 was using up 190% of my two processors (out of 200%). This saddened me deeply because I had to force quit the program. When I tried it again I saw the same results. After scrapping it and opening up my nostalgic copy of iClip3 I get this message:

picture-3.png

Suffice it to say I did not experience any problems. I tried iClip 4on a new user account on my macmini and I had the same thing happen. Even running iClip 4 on a MacBook I encountered problems- hearing the fan progressively speed up from silence to all the way up to jetliner.

All in all, I think that the programming team worked extremely hard and is to be commended on their software (according to the screenshots and similar dashboard widget). I did heed the statement in the email which I received that stated “Although iClip 4 is very stable at this point and just about ready for release at the Macworld Expo next week, please keep in mind that it’s still a beta version.” I expected it to at least launch.

I have faith that this is only a beta and that the final version will knock my socks off. But until I have it on my hot little hard drive I will just have to hope that I get what I paid for.

*EDIT* Apparently some people have working copies. And in speaking with him, it is being run on a G4 Powerbook. My experience as been on new Intel macs.


  • http://phil.electricweekend.com Phil Bowell

    I have the very same iClip 4 beta. I run it on a Core Duo 20″ iMac and have had no issues what so ever with it. I haven’t tried it on my iBook G4 as my iMac is my main machine, but so far it has beel faultless. Could it be you have something running that could conflict with the app? I don’t have much knowledge of that, but it was the only thing I could think of that would stop your machine running it. Other than it’s becuase you had iClip 3 running previously, I have not had any version of it before the Beta of 4.

  • Eugene Cook

    I am running the iClip 4 beta as well, on a macbook pro. It runs wonderfully, and I have yet to come across a bug with the program.

  • http://is.derekpunsalan.com Derek

    I can confirm that the utility eats more RAM than I think it should. I’ve remove the app and decided to stick with the Dashboard widget which is a little more convenient especially while running two displays. It’s kind of a pain to have to turn my head to find the sidebar. What would be nice is to have something like this appear on the screen edge of whatever display you’re using. A little too much to ask for I’m sure.

  • http://www.religionism.net Gideon

    Had the same problem, both on dual core intel macs. One an iMac and the other a Macbook – neither install worked. One had previously had a copy of iClip 3 on it, the other did not. So.. yep.

    I’m not going to write it off, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence either.

  • http://www.schildkroeter.de Jon

    Running iClip 4 for a while now on a G4 PB, no problems…

  • http://phil.electricweekend.com Phil Bowell

    Derek: I would be interested to know what you think too much RAM is for an app like this. I jave no idea how much it should or shouldn’t be using?

  • http://is.derekpunsalan.com Derek

    10 wells saving various text snippets and links is using up 76MB. Compare that to similar snippets in the Dashboard version which is under 40MB. Again, for some reason, the widget seems to perform a little better.

  • http://phil.electricweekend.com Phil Bowell

    Thats interesting, I have 10 wells with 2 pictures and the rest text snippets and it only takes 20MB, how strange!

  • Jon

    I will have to ask them at the conference
    -(UES) Jon

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