iPhone App: Pastebot

Hello everyone, it’s been a while since the last iPhone app review, but the holidays gave me plenty of time to download and test new awesome apps, so brace yourselves, the next few weeks will be interesting if you own an iPhone. I had a look at our previous app reviews and realized that most of them were targeted at people with specific interests: for example, Eliminate Pro is for gamers, or GuitarToolKit for musicians, etc… That’s why I chose to review Pastebot this week. I can guarantee that whoever you are, geek or technically impaired, astronaut or musician, you’ll find this magnificent app useful, because it deals with one of the most basic (yet most powerful) function a computer or smartphone can carry out: copy and paste.
Pastebot was developed by Tapbots, a company you may already know for their Convertbot and Weightbot apps. Weightbot, their first product, is designed to help you loose weight. It will track the mass you’ve lost and tell you how long you’ll need to reach a certain goal, based on your current and past performance. Other features include body mass index computing, chart tracking and much more.

Convertbot, their second product, is a tool that will help you convert stuff, a lot of stuff. Need to convert radioactivity measurements? Typography sizes? Angles? Currency? Data rate? Illuminance? Pressure? Convertbot’s versatility is a great asset, but its real beauty comes from the elegance of its design and user interface. The UI just makes sense, everything is logical and very aesthetic. The sounds that are triggered by certain actions also add a lot of flair to the already ultra polished app.
But back to Pastebot. What does it do exactly do?

What Pastebot does

Pastebot is a clipboard manager. As you may know, Apple introduced copy and paste with iPhone OS 3.0, a long awaited feature that at the time was already included on standard smartphones. Anyway, Apple’s copy and paste is well executed, but what if you need to add some depth to the basic functionality? Well Pastebot provides just that. As soon as you launch the app, Pastebot will display your most recently copied items, be it text, image, phone number or any other file type supported by the OS’ copy function. The items are stored in chronological order, but you can organize them in folders that you can create on the dashboard. Each folder can have its own name and Pastebot even provides custom icons for mail, documents, images and so on, which gives a very organized feel to the whole app. The clipboard can store up to 99 items, but the folders store as many things as there is disk space left on your iPhone.
At this point, Pastebot’s features already seem very useful, but the Tabots developers didn’t just leave it at that. The true power behind the app resides in the filters you can apply to the stored clippings. Let me explain:
Imagine you have just received an MMS with a picture in it, and that you want to forward it to a friend. The only problem is that the picture is upside down, and you’d like to correct this first. Easy! Simply hold your finger on the picture to copy it, and then start Pastebot. The picture will appear on the clipboard, and if you select it, a whole range of options are displayed: crop, adjust brightness, sepia, rotate, and so on. In this case, we just rotate it and save it. Once your done, go back to the clipboard, press on the image (this will copy it) and go back to your MMS. Select paste, and enjoy the corrected picture.

The text filters are even more powerful: you can edit text in your clipboard, convert everything to lower or upper case, decode or encode HTML tags, and much more. If you need to keep the text for later use, just save it in one of the folders you can create.

Criticism, pricing and verdict

Pastebot is a bad name, giving the fact that the app can manipulate your clippings, store them, handle the copy / paste functionality – all in one place. Oh, and did I mention that you can sync your folders with your mac? Just go to the developer’s website and download the free software, mac only.
The only real shortcoming I could find was actually due to iPhone OS itself: ideally, the application would run in the background, monitoring your activity and copying everything into the clipboard without you having to launch Pastebot between each item. This isn’t the case, unfortunately. Also, Apple doesn’t allow third party apps to access rich text information, which basically means that the font styles and sizes, formatting and other text information will not be copied into the clipboard.

The app costs 2.99$ on the App store, which is a fair price. In traditional Tapbot fashion, Pastebot distillates exceptional design, powerful functionality and unique concepts in one app.