iPhone OS App Spotlight: Pastebot

Pastebot
by Tapbots

There are upwards of 180,000 apps in the App Store today, but there are very few that can claim to be nearly as well-designed as Tapbots' three "bots" apps: Weightbot, Convertbot and Pastebot. All three are worthwhile apps, each designed to serve only one function, but to do it exceedingly well. The most useful in my eyes is the third and newest 'bot, Pastebot.

Pastebot is, essentially, a clipboard manager. You simply copy something from any app that supports it - text or image - and launch Pastebot. Whatever you copied is automatically imported and stored in the app's clipboard. From here, you can organize your clippings into whatever folders you'd like, and have at your disposal many options for using said clippings. A single tap on anything in the list will copy that item for you to paste elsewhere. The cool blue LED-style light you see next to the clipping isn't just eye candy: it's a helpful indicator of what's sitting on your clipboard, ready to be pasted.

For text clippings, you get useful info like character and word counts, and a variety of filters you can run on the text. If you want to convert all text to upper or lowercase, run a find & replace, or even something as specific as converting to and from "smart quotes," you can do all of that with ease.

Image clippings are even more interesting to work with. A single tap brings up an info panel with the date it was captured and pixel dimensions. Quick and easy cropping and rotating is a button away. The image filters are simple, but useful if you just want to quickly adjust brightness, or make a black & white or sepia image.

All of this so far sounds good, right? Functionally, there's little you could be left wanting here. I'd even say it goes well above what you'd expect from something that's just meant to manage your clippings. Even so, there's still two killer features of Pastebot that put it further over the top:

Sync

Tapbots offers a free Mac OS X app that runs as a preference pane called Pastebot Sync. After installing it and pairing your iPhone or iPod touch with it, you've opened up a whole new way of connecting your mobile and desktop lives. The Mac app will run at all times in the background, aware of any "copy" command you make. If you have Pastebot running on your iPhone, whatever text or image you copy on your Mac is instantly pushed to Pastebot. In addition, you can tap and hold on something on your iPhone and it will paste into whatever Mac app you're in (logically speaking - you of course can't paste a JPEG into Safari's address bar, for example). This is especially useful for URLs you may come across online that you'd rather read or access on a computer later.

All of this amounts to an incredibly useful addition and extension of an already impressive app. But there's one last thing that truly takes Pastebot to a higher place.

The UI
A functional user interface - and this should go without saying - is a must, and a beautiful user interface can sometimes be hard to find. They're out there, and sometimes even from a company besides Apple or Adobe (yes, I actually do love the CS4 UI). The trick, of course, is finding a UI that's both of these things. The interface of Pastebot is gorgeous on a level that would make Steve Jobs proud. Everything about it is clearly custom-made, but it still feels and behaves like a native iPhone app. An elegant dark theme is complemented by slick animation, thoughtful layout, and even cool (not annoying!) sound effects. The only app I've used that has anywhere near this level of polish is Convertbot - another Tapbots app.

If any of these features seem useful to you, give Pastebot a try: there's a lot of functionality here for $2.99. Heck, there's a lot of functionality here for it to justify a $9.99 price tag, but that's just me.

iPad Compatibility
As of now, Pastebot runs and works just fine on the iPad, though it still runs as an iPhone app. Tapbots recently made a blog post regarding the iPad that's worth a read. In short, provided they create iPad-specific versions of their three apps so far, Pastebot will be first on the list, but nothing is set in stone. If nothing else, they're working on an update to the Sync prefpane, which currently is only designed to work with one device: Something that was really never an issue before people were wanting to sync both an iPhone and iPad to one computer.

In any case, Pastebot itself runs perfectly fine on the iPad, and once the sync situation is resolved, is perfectly usable until the theoretical iPad-optimized version comes along.

Links
Tapbots website
Pastebot (iTunes Link)