iXiu: New, easy eye-candy for your clipboard history

Originally downloaded 6/8/06. Now here’s something totally new… iXiu is just barely in beta at this point, so I don’t expect a whole lot. But I immediately figured out how to use it. Any time you copy/paste, your paste can go onto a Xiu pasteboard. Nothing too unique there. But the pasteboards themselves can be transparent and any color you like… you can even use an image fill, so gradiant fans, watch out! The font, brightness, and graphic characteristics (for pasted images) are also customizable. Furthermore, you can have multiple pasteboards, each a different style. The pasteboards sit as tabs on any edge of the screen, kind of like DragThing or StickyWindows. There isn’t even a website for it yet, but MacUpdate has a download. Heck, I don’t even know if it’s shareware or what! But I do know it’s pretty darn cool.

Update 1/9/07. Well, a few days ago iXiu was finally released at version 1.0, and it’s got a new icon and everything! I’ve tried it out pretty much with each release since June, but only now do I understand what the developer sees as its primary purpose: iXiu is a clipboard-sharing utility, a very elaborate one at that. In some ways, it’s simply another Bonjour-enabled networking tool, but goes way beyond what DropCopy and others can do by way of clipboard and file sharing. iXiu lets you draw on a pasteboard, for example, and other iXiu clients on the network can presumably both see your drawing and “chime in.” Now that it’s out, and I understand what it’s up to, I’ll try it again. Hopefully the missing functionalities that have been mere mysteries in the past will now be filled in, too. iXiu is $14 for 1-5 licenses.

Version as tested: 1.0.