Keep Your Clipboard History A Long-Press Away With ClipStore And Button Shortcut

Android Police

By Brian O'Toole

Published Sep 29, 2010

Maybe you're like me: you don't find Voice Search all that useful; you have an impenetrably foreign, non-Google-approved accent; you find yourself frustrated by the single-entry nature of Android's traditional clipboard.

If you deem yourself a match with any of those things, I'm willing to bet you find at least one of the two applications on show here of use.

ClipStore

Android's clipboard isn't anything special. You put stuff there and it disappears when you overwrite it with something else. ClipStore is a nice twist on that, offering the ability to save your previous clipboard entries, pin entries, add entries manually, and re-copy old entries.

ClipStore fades in over your current application.

ClipStore can be accessed from the status bar, or ... well, we'll get to that other method later. In the settings, you can set how long ClipStore will wait before saving your current clipboard to its history - I changed it to "Unset" which seems to save copied text instantly.

Additions can be made with the Add button revealed by pressing your MENU key, and previous entries can be copied back to your current clipboard by simply tapping them. It is also possible to delete entries if you do not want ClipStore retaining sensitive information, but be aware that you cannot delete the latest entry (ie. your current clipboard) as ClipStore will simply re-copy the clipboard back into its history.

There are other applications offering similar functionality, such as Clipper and ClipBird, but ClipStore appeals most with its unobtrusive UI.

Button Shortcut

Do you really use Voice Search? I mean, really, apart from showing people how amazing your phone is? If I'm honest, I don't, and it feels like Voice Search is taking up useful button-space by occupying the long-press SEARCH slot. That's where Button Shortcut comes in. Button Shortcut adds an option in your long-press menu for SEARCH (and the Camera button, if you have one) which then allows you to launch any application through it. I initially had the camera application set to the shortcut, since the Nexus One has no camera button, but once I found ClipStore I felt it was a perfect match.

There's an ad at the bottom, but you rarely open the application itself anyway.

Operation of Button Shortcut is very simple. Start the application, and choose whichever app you would like to launch when long-pressing SEARCH. Next time you long-press, a menu will appear, letting you set Button Shortcut as the new default. This will then launch the app you chose, in my case ClipStore.

Ideally this functionality would be integrated into Android itself, but Button Shortcut seems to do the trick pretty nicely.