Snow Leopard nice touch: no more "Picture 1" files

I've always been a fan of ⌘-Shift-4 for taking quick and easy screenshots on my Mac, even with such level-up options as Jing, Skitch, GrabUp and LittleSnapper readily to hand. What I wasn't a fan of, however, was the proliferation of "Picture 1," "Picture 2,"... up to "Picture N" screenshot files on my desktop. Not only was it tricky to figure out which Picture file was which (a task made easier with Quick Look), it was also reasonably likely that at some point I'd overwrite a Picture 1 someplace that I wanted to keep with a brand-new Picture 1 I just snapped and copied off my desktop.

It's certainly not one of the marquee features of Mac OS X 10.6, but there's one little Snow Leopard tweak that's already won my heart: no more Picture 1s! Screenshots to file created via the system key commands (⌘-Shift-3 or -4, add the Control key to capture to the Clipboard instead of to a file) now get a name that's quite a bit more descriptive, including the date and time of the capture. No more file name collisions, no more wondering which Picture is the one you took of that cryptic error message in the middle of the night. Viva Snow!

Manage your iPhone's clipboard with Snippets

The cut, copy, and paste features (finally) included in version 3.0 of the iPhone OS greatly improve the productivity of the iDevices. However, there is room for improvement. Enter Erich Bratton with his clipboard manager app, Snippets, available now in the iTunes App Store [iTunes link].

Snippets offers a way to organize bits of text that can be accessed quickly to paste into emails, text messages, notes, and other places. The clips can be categorized into a number of pre-determined or user-created folders as well. To help get new users comfortable, the app comes with a variety of canned responses and other text pieces, some of which are hysterical.

The real power of Snippets lies in the ability to paste or create text in the app for later use. Think of it as boilerplates for your iPhone. If you find yourself writing similar things over and over, simply create an entry in Snippets. When you need to write that same text next time, visit the Snippets app first, view the desired text block (which automatically copies it to the clipboard), and then paste it into whatever app you'd like. It really couldn't be much simpler.

The canned responses included with Snippets are worth its price of $.99 alone, in this blogger's opinion. But even if you are wittier than I and appreciate original pieces of text, Snippets is a great app with a very easy-to-use interface that I plan to use again and again. In fact, I might just start using it to write some generic paragraphs that I can use in every review. What a time-saver!