[Edit: Pastebot Sync was updated a few days after I wrote this little piece – see the update info here.]
Pastebot 1.0 is a clicking, beeping, and glowing delight to behold. It’s ridiculously fast at throwing pictures and text from my Mac to the iPhone, and it captures my iPhone clipboard very well (doesn’t work when backgrounded, though). I’d say it’s Tapbots’ best app to date – and that’s a real achievement, since it’s also the most powerful and versatile little bot they’ve released on the App Store. I haven’t quite gone as deep into the app as Shawn Blanc has (great read), but I have done a little thinking on the app and why I think it’s so kickass.
First of all, the core functionality of the app totally fits in with the current way I’ve come to use my iPhone. I believe I use the very same stand that Mark Jardine shows in the Vimeo-hosted Pastebot demo (I think it’s the Just Mobile Xtand), and it actually turns the iPhone into a fantastic little Mini-Me monitor. I often load up my text notes or the relevant app as I type out a review, so I always have a handy reference as I write posts up. I’m not completely sure about how Pastebot will fit into my workflow yet, but I’m looking forward to toying with it more in the days to come.
One thing I already like about the app is that is how it picks my clipboard up so quickly and naturally. The currently copied item just slides right into place from the top of the screen, and copying an item is as simple as tapping on it and waiting for the light to turn blue. I’ve read that you can paste thousands of words into Pastebot and it will still transfer them perfectly, so I tried it with a couple of hundred and saw the results instantly. I’ll probably take to drafting articles within the Notes app now, instead of using Evernote like I have been for the last couple of months. Evernote’s two-way sync is great, but the iPhone app just chews up iPhone text and garbles it up when I try to paste it into WordPress. I’ve tried throwing a few of my Notes app drafts straight into WordPress and it’s worked like a dream, so my toonie is already well spent right there.
Another thing I’m also looking forward to is the ability to copy photos. I’ve been using Evernote to upload my pictures one by one to my Mac, and then I drag them from the Mac client right to the desktop for upload to the site.
Pastebot is still a little too literal about copying and pasting in 1.0, but the devs have been hinting that that could change with future updates. You can easily paste text to and from the Mac with Pastebot Sync, but photos and other things aren’t quite as simple. Shawn Blanc did a lot more testing in this area than I did, but I have learned that you can’t easily send pictures from an iPhone to a Mac through Pastebot.
Pasting pics into Finder or iPhoto doesn’t work (although iPhoto pics can be copied straight to Pastebot). Preview.app almost offers a solution, but you can only ever save your iPhone -> Mac pictures as thumbnails. Yeargh. I definitely appreciated the Twitter help from Tapbots, though, and I certainly don’t mind waiting a while for better photo transfer functionality.
Pastebot is still on sale for $2, so if you’re anticipating a need for a clipboard manager with some kickass Mac syncing possibilities, then I think this app is well worth the Toonie investment. It’s already great for automatically clipping little snippets of information from around your iPhone, and I’d imagine the syncing aspect is only going to get better with subsequent releases.
Continue reading:
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TAGS: clipboard manager, pastebot
