Capturing items

How ShoveBox Stores Data

ShoveBox stores clippings in the following types:
text Text
image Image
image Bookmark
image Web Archive
image PDF

ShoveBox will try to pick the smartest type from the above for any data you add.

There are two main ways to add data to ShoveBox: by dragging it in or by composing from scratch.

Drag. Drop. Done.

There are two types of data you can import by dragging it up to the box icon in your menubar. When the data you're dragging is something that ShoveBox recognizes, the little box will open and you'll see a green plus sign near your cursor.

Clippings — The easiest way to import data into ShoveBox is just to drag it in from another program. You might drag text from within a word processor or an IM conversation. Or you can drag URLs and bookmarks to ShoveBox directly from your web browser. ShoveBox should know what to do with the data.

Files — ShoveBox supports a number of common file formats. It's an important distinction that ShoveBox itself does not store arbitrary files. It reads their contents and converts them to an entry of the appropriate type, when it can. A few of the formats ShoveBox supports are plain text files, rich text files, Word documents, PDFs, most of the image formats supported by Preview (e.g. JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc), weblocs, and text clippings.

From Scratch

All the ways to create new entries from scratch can be found by clicking on the box icon and, from the resulting menu, selecting 'Capture'. Here's how each of those works:

Quick Jot — Quick Jot is for catching those scraps of information that fly by at such tremendous velocity that you have a high risk of losing them if you don't act fast.

It's simple to use: type it in, press return, and away it goes. You can invoke Quick Jot through the menu, or, better yet, a keyboard shortcut you define in ShoveBox's preferences.

Import Clipboard — This makes ShoveBox look at your clipboard and create an entry based on the contents. It's an alternative to dragging, and, like QuickJot, you can set up a shortcut to invoke this action in preferences.

New Text Note — This is a way to start writing something down when you actually do have a moment to think about it. It lets you set a title and format your text. One caveat: the resulting text note is not 'shoved' until the first time you close its window.

From iSight — If you've got an iSight or DV input on your Mac, you can quickly create image entries from the video. It's quite handy for capturing diagrams and notes on whiteboards.

System-wide Service

In every Mac OS X program, you'll find a menu tucked out of the way in the application menu called "Services." If ShoveBox is installed in your Applications folder, you'll see a "Send To ShoveBox" menu item here. You can choose this (or press its shortcut) to send the selected text, image, or file to ShoveBox.

Print to PDF

Print dialog with Print to PDF highlighted

In any Print dialog in Mac OS X, you can select "Save PDF to ShoveBox" to shove the printout as PDF. Your normal processing rules will be applied.

Browser Bookmarklet

Illustrating the usage of a bookmarklet

A bookmarklet is a handy little script that you can save as a bookmark in your web browser. Here's one called "Shove This" that sends the webpage you're viewing to ShoveBox.

Shove This Drag this to your bookmarks bar! (see illustration)