Review: ScrapX

Product Name: ScrapX 1.3.4
Company: Aqueous Software
URL: http://www.aqueoussoftware.com/
Category: Utility software
Price: $20 (various deals for multiple copies, including educational pricing)
Requirements: Any OS X computer
Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Most Mac users can get by fine keeping all the pictures, text files, sounds, and other original content within the files specific to the authoring application, but graphic designers especially soon find themselves needing to store commonly used elements that can be shared by many different applications. The classic examples of such elements are logos, which are normally created in a drawing or graphic design program like Photoshop, but are eventually used by programs as diverse as Word, QuarkXPress, and Dreamweaver. The system clipboard can of course be used to transfer things from one program to another, but it isn't a place to store things. Instead, the Mac operating system was provisioned right from the start with a program called the Scrapbook, the ideal place to store things like formatted text, bitmap and vector based artwork, and short sound tracks.

The original Scrapbook in the classic Mac OS

In the early, non-multitasking versions of the Mac OS the Scrapbook provided the easiest way to share graphics between multiple applications.

The Scrapbook was designed as a 'desk accessory' program, that is, a small program that could run alongside regular applications even where multitasking wasn't possible (as was the case with versions of the Mac OS prior to System 6 MultiFinder). The Scrapbook removed the need for the user to have to quit one active application (such as a page layout program) just to launch a graphics program each time he needed to recover a single design element. Instead, all the graphical parts could be created at once, stored in the Scrapbook, and then with the graphic program shut down the page layout program could be fired up and all the necessary graphics copied straight from the Scrapbook. While multitasking and the lower cost of RAM made it easier to run multiple applications at once, the Scrapbook remained a useful tool, and from System 7.5 onwards, additional file formats were incorporated, such as QuickTime-compatible media formats and QuickDraw 3D models.

Later versions of the Scrapbook gained additional functions, such as the ability to display information about the item being viewed.

But there was an Achilles' heel to the Scrapbook, and that was its inability to sort the items stored inside it. The more items you put into the Scrapbook, the less easy it became to find any particular one of them quickly. Some people kept multiple Scrapbooks, one for pictures, another for sounds, or maybe divided them up into different Scrapbooks for different projects. Nibbling away at the Scrapbook's functionality were Clippings, files that could store many of the things the Scrapbook could, but instead of all together, it was a case of one Clipping, one item. Clippings could be created easily by dragging the selected item from the creator application, such as the QuickTime Player or BBEdit onto a Finder window or the Desktop, and renamed and organised as desired. Clippings could then be dragged into any other document, without the need for copying and pasting, and while the contents of the Clipping were embedded in the new document, the actual Clipping file itself was untouched and could be used as often as you wanted. The system wasn't perfect, and some applications handled Clippings badly, for example Word exports the Clippings as graphical PICT files rather than the formatted text files (though text dragged straight from one Word document to another is formatted perfectly). Others, such as Photoshop, didn't support Clippings at all. Despite these serious limitations Apple has left Clippings as the only method built into OS X for storing things outside of their creator applications, since the Scrapbook was not carried over from OS 9 to OS X. Fortunately, there are third-party alternatives, and ScrapX is one of the best.

Installing ScrapX

ScrapX can be obtained in English and French language versions from the Aqueous Software web site. Installation is very simple, nothing more than decompressing a Stuffit archive and moving the resulting folder to wherever you want it. Inside the folder are the application, some PDF format documentation, and an introductory scrapbook file. This contains a variety of items that demonstrate the range of things the program can do. The documentation is extensive, the main manual being over fifty pages long, but at a basic level at least the user can pretty much learn ScrapX by using it. The key functions of copying and pasting (or dragging and dropping) are the same as with the Mac OS original. Other functions, like sorting items and exporting something are obvious enough and will be handled easily by any experienced Mac user. It's only when you look at the new functions, like embedded URLs, that you'll need to read the manual.

Exploring the introductory scrapbook file is probably the fastest way to learn ScrapX quickly.

The only other step beyond reviewing the documentation that most users will want to do is to import their original pre-OS X Mac Scrapbook. Under the File menu item in ScrapX is a command to do just this, and the process works almost flawlessly. I only found a single format that didn't copy across from my original Scrapbook into ScrapX, QuickDraw 3D 3DMF model files. These are not very widely seen, and so unless you routinely use these files, this shortcoming won't affect you. Other files types, such as JPEG and GIF graphics, PICT files, bitmaps, QuickTime movies, and System 7 sound resources, were all imported correctly. Other file types only partially supported by the original Scrapbook, or not at all, can also be added to the ScrapX file, such as animated GIFs and MP3s.

Usage

One of the principal shortcomings of the original Scrapbook was the fact items stored inside it couldn't be sorted. This is easily done in ScrapX, by using the sort tool. A variety of criteria can be used, either one at a time or in concert with one another, for example by type and then by size. Some of these criteria are easy enough to understand (like date and size) but others are a bit more cryptic. File type, for example, places GIFs before JPEGS logically enough, but PNGs come before PICTs, and sound files come before any of these!

Items in the scrapbook can be easily sorted by various criteria, and kept that way.

ScrapX also includes a search tool, and this can be used to search for things by type, size, content, and so on. The results are displayed in the main window, which is now slightly modified; items outside the search criteria remain in the thumbnail window but are shaded grey and cannot be selected. A simple database-like set of buttons at the top right lets you choose between the items that were found, the ones that were omitted, or all the items in the scrapbook file.

A simple search tool allows the user to track down specific items, such as by item type.

Items can also have strings of text, memos, added to them. Primarily these are used as names, making sorting and searching for items much more simple. This feature was absent from the original Scrapbook and will be welcome by artists and other users who need to store a large number of items.

Other Tricks

ScrapX has a number of other tricks beyond simply organising and sorting graphics, passages of text, and other bits and pieces. One is a basic slideshow tool that works in collaboration with the search facility to allow you to show off just one certain subset of stored items if you want to (such as JPEGs but not text files). Slides are normally advanced automatically, but by pausing the slide show they can be advanced manually using the arrow keys. It isn't a very powerful slideshow though, lacking, for example, a way to resize the window on the fly to show each graphic or whatever at full size.

ScrapX displays a wide variety of data associated with the item, including size, type, and location.

Another neat trick is the retention of the source location of items stored in ScrapX. This allows ScrapX to be used as a thumbnail gallery for artwork and other media files on your computer. When an item is dragged onto the ScrapX window, the name of the file is added to the 'source' field. Though part of the ScrapX scrapbook file, a linkage remains between the item in ScrapX and the original elsewhere on the hard disk. A menu item (or keyboard shortcut) can be invoked to show the original file again. Naturally, this linkage doesn't exist where items were imported from a Classic Mac OS Scrapbook file or pasted in using the clipboard, but it does hold if the original location of the file was on the Internet. Instead of a source name, there is a URL, and pressing the 'Open Content URL' button takes the user to the original file on the Web. Where files are shared on a network or Intranet, this feature could make ScrapX a very useful catalogue.

No More Note Pad

Apart from the Scrapbook, there was another desk accessory that could be used to store things. This was the Note Pad, and unlike the Scrapbook it was limited to handling only text, but unlike the Scrapbook any text inside it could be edited and copies in pieces and not just as single blocks. The Note Pad therefore was a useful place to store, edit, and compose short bits of text such as addresses, e-mails, URLs, and so on. Scrapbook fills this gap nicely, and can be a useful place to store text. New text items can be created on the fly and rich text formatting applied as required. The standard OS X services are available, including the font palette for changing the type, speech for reading things out, and spell checking.

ScrapX combines several of the features of the Note Pad with the Scrapbook. Sections of text items can be selected and edited, and rich text formatting applied.

Issues and Bugs

There are several known limitations that are declared in the user guide, and prospective users would do well to download the demo version and read this section of the guide fully to make sure that ScrapX will fit into their workflow. One problem for web designers is that while HTML files can be dragged and dropped straight into the ScrapX, it doesn't display graphics and other linked content. Dragging the item from the ScrapX window to a text editor reveals that the HTML code has been stored correctly though. So while ScrapX can be used to store bits of HTML that you might want to carry across to multiple web pages, such as links, e-mail addresses, JavaScript code, and so on, it isn't a place to archive actual web pages. As mentioned earlier, QuickDraw 3D files cannot be sorted in ScrapX, and neither can certain other file types such as GarageBand tracks and clippings. A more serious limitation is the fact that items cannot be dragged and dropped directly between Photoshop and ScrapX, though copying and pasting works fine.

Items cannot be dragged directly into ScrapX from Photoshop.

Conclusion

ScrapX in every way exceeds the standards of the original Scrapbook, and if you find yourself using the Classic Scrapbook a lot, or miss its functionality in OS X, then the modest shareware fee for registering ScrapX will be money well spent. There really isn't anything much that isn't right, and the known bugs and problems are all relatively minor. While you could get by with clippings, plain text files, or simply making lots of graphic files or whatever and arrange them into folders, keeping frequently used items in a scrapbook of some sort makes a lot of sense. ScrapX does a great job of this, and is warmly recommended.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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