I’m about an inch away from rewriting Clipboard Historian in Java because of the problems I’m having with REALbasic.
As you may know, Clipboard Historian has support for picture clippings.. in previous versions, these pictures were stored with the text clippings in a text file, which was really, really, slow.
So I start migrating my text clipping storage to a REALSQLdatabase, and everything works fine. Now, time to deal with pictures.
I have it working (at the moment) to, every single time you open and close Clipboard Historian, write every picture out to a file using f.SaveAsJPEG and then read it back in using f.OpenAsPicture. This works OK if you have one or two pictures, but once you get into 10 or 20, launching and quitting Clipboard Historian starts taking several seconds… which is way to long for me.
So I have a new plan. I have a record table, which contains a picture ID. Then, in the picture table, I am storing three things, picture ID, thumbnail, and the actual picture. Using a small script I wrote (I will post it later), I can change pictures into text and back again, but it is a slow process. When you copy a picture onto the clipboard, a thumbnail of the image is instantly created and displayed. The larger image is stored in the database… once. When you double click on an image, it is queried out of the database and rendered. This way, the larger picture only needs to be read when you first copy it (which might take half a second) and when you double click on it to view or copy it.
Problem solved, but wouldn’t it be nice if the features I paid for actually worked?
