Share your clipboard among your devices with Command-C

I often write my blog posts on the Mac and it has always been cumbersome to grab the scripts from Pythonista or general url actions. I was often emailing myself this info and I always felt a bit embarrassed doing so. Then I wrote a collection of actions to share plain text using Dropbox and access them on my Mac using Launchbar.

Then I met Command-C and my workflow changed upside down.

Command-C lets you share text, images and links¹ among your iOS devices on a local network using your clipboard. Confirm all your devices and then try the magic: just tap one of them to replace the clipboard contents on the end of the other line.

Command-C also has extensive x-callback-url support and Danilo Torrisi, the developer behind this remarkable app, wrote a great documentation, a page where you can generate browser bookmarklets to quickly share from the web² and a section within the app to generate your url actions so you don’t have to worry about encoding your device name.

It holds 3 different parameters: copy shares the current clipboard; copyText sends a string of text to another device and copyAndOpenURL to grab a url and open it in another device’s browser. Every content requires a device to beam into: deviceName points out to a device name, just remember it must be encoded if you’re doing an actions manually; and deviceIndex to select a device according to its position in your list, remember to consider 0 for the first device and so on.

Command-C is useful for those tiny bits of text you want to access from a different device and I have an action to send the current clipboard to my MacBook in the front page of Launch Center Pro. But, as Eric Pramono has shown once again, you can use Command-C to overcome the lack of AirDrop on older devices, such as my iPhone 4 which relied on Dropbox to automatically upload pictures to my Mac. I’ll publish Eric’s action here, but you should check his post on Command-C for other awesome workflows.

launch://x-callback-url/clipboard?attach=photo:library&quality=[list:Quality|60|80|100]&maxwidth=600&x-success={{command-c://x-callback-url/copy?deviceName=[list:Device|iMac=epramono|MacBook=Eric Pramono’s MacBook|iPad 2=Eric Pramono’s iPad]&x-source=Launch%20Pro&x-success=launch%3A%2F%2F}}

This action will open your photo library in Launch Center Pro and attach a selected picture to your clipboard, there’s also a list to select the desired quality and a specified max width of 600 pixels. Then comes another list where you can select the device you want to share to using Command-C. After success, it returns to LCP. Tap here to install this action.

Command-C nails its functionality and makes room to take it to the next level, but is it revolutionary? Maybe that is not even relevant. This app improved my life and the way I interact with my devices and isn’t that what every app was supposed to do? Do you even remember the last time you bought an app that truly increased your productivity? Command-C is one of those.