A Knowledgebase for all Die Designers…

Ditto is a great program for increasing productivity, regardless of what you are using it for. Even simply for filling out forms or whatever, I use it often.

Haven’t you found yourself wanting to copy something to the clipboard by using Ctrl+C and then realizing – “Wait, I also need to copy that, but I can only copy one thing at a time. Nuts!” That’s where Ditto comes in. The picture below is a great example of this. I knew I was going to write this post and I knew I wanted to paste the web address in here as far as where to get Ditto and I also wanted to copy their description of it into here. So I simply used Ctrl+C on both things. Then when I ‘m ready to use one or the other (or any of the last several items I’d copied to the clipboard) I simply press the default key combination to bring up the Ditto box which is Ctrl+~. (That’s the control key plus the key to the left of the number 1 key, and as you may remember from a previous post, this ~ is a tilde.) Here’s a picture of the box that pops up:

Ditto is a free open source program that is very tiny and loads with Windows. I’ve been using it since Windows XP and now use it with Windows 7 Professional and have had no issues at all. You can get it here:
http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/index.php

It is extremely simple to install – just use the default options. All you need to remember is to let it start when Windows starts and that way Ditto captures all clipboard entries. Then all you need to remember is that the hotkey to open Ditto so that you can select one of the entries from the list is Ctrl+~. That’s it!

Here’s the official description from the Ditto web site:
Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, …..

General tips & tricks for all, Software we use, Windows tips & tricks

(Purchased on sale at Office Max for $25 for 3 pcs for one year, normally $60 for 3 pcs for one year.)
Way back in time, perhaps 10 years let’s say, Norton AV was known as the best there was. Gradually, over time, it became a real resouce pig and took forever to install and was nearly impossible to uninstall. Everybody recognized this as fact, as well as many other shortcomings.

That was up until Norton AV 2009 came out. Apparently Norton got the message and completely re-wrote the software. Installation takes just a few minutes at most and it is easy to uninstall now as well if you need to. I like it a lot since I find it is very unobtrusive, although it is a bit aggressive with exe files that it doesn’t recognize and that developers have not put on its white list.

One of the things I especially like about Norton AntiVirus 2010 is that it starts up FAST at computer boot up and lets you start using your computer seconds after it starts up. Previous to Norton I used ESET. I’d used it for less than a year. It is quite expensive but it worked very well. But it had some obtrusive issues and it took a little longer than I would have liked to start up. Before that I used Avast Professional on all of our computers, which we are phasing out. Avast really ties up your computer for a long time when you boot up before you can use it.

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