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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.

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.

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:

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.