History is great, needs shortcut management - sjk

Create Snippet From Selection was briefly implemented then removed for reasons explained by Austin on the old iSnip weblog. Unfortunately no comments were migrated to the new weblog but I salvaged Austin's from the old one:

'Create Snippet From Selection' would be an incredibly useful feature to include in iSnip. However, we discovered numerous problems with our implementation of it that caused us to remove it as opposed to provide users with poorly functioning features. The real reason why we can't add it (yet) is this: There is no 100% reliable way to retrieve the selected text. To obtain the selected text, we would backup the current clipboard contents, press command-C for the user, create a snippet from the current contents, then restore the old one. In theory this works... however because we are pressing the key for the user (and not literally performing the copy operation) there is no definite way to determine if the copy operation has completed. This would often yield snippets simply containing the original clipboard contents. Another problem is that we could not use a hot key for this feature. We need to press keys for the user, so if they are holding another key down while we 'press' them, nothing will happen. As it stands, it is probably faster just to take advantage of the clipboard history feature (and soon rule based sorting). Keep in mind that we intend to continue looking into possible solutions, and hope that we can implement it properly.

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Thursday, February 17 2005 @ 12:55 PM PST

History is great, needs shortcut management - Dave DeLong

We've managed to move over all the old comments. The comment referred to above is now available here:

http://davedelong.com/wordpress/?p=7#comments

Thanks,

Dave DeLong

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Friday, February 18 2005 @ 12:16 AM PST