Clippy is all-new. Every screen has been rebuilt in a warm, branded design
language we call Ember — inspired by the paperclip that started it all.
Under the hood, dozens of smart improvements make the app faster, more
reliable, and far more powerful.
✨ Highlights
- Brand-new look — amber accent, rounded typography, card-based history,
custom menu bar icon, and 3-slide onboarding. - Inspector pattern across the app — context-aware right panel replaces
cramped toolbars. Select any annotation or clipboard item to edit its
properties live. - Screenshot Editor, reimagined — Studio bar on top, tool rail on the
left, Inspector on the right. Per-annotation editing for color, stroke
style, arrowhead, fill, shadow, text formatting, box sizing, and more. - Smart Dock Preview — Windows-style rise-in animation, numbered badges
for keyboard navigation, inline title bars, event-driven exit (instant close). - Privacy & Permissions panel — one place to see every macOS permission
Clippy needs, with one-click grant, re-check, and "Reset All Permissions"
to cleanly fix stale entries from a previous install.
🎨 Design Overhaul
- New design system (
Ember) — tokens for colors, typography, spacing, shadows - Custom paperclip-C menu bar icon with template tinting
- Redesigned ClipboardCard with content-aware rendering (URL previews,
color swatches, code blocks, image thumbnails, JSON collapse) - Empty states with warm copy and illustrations
- Settings reorganized into sidebar (NavigationSplitView)
- AboutView with feature grid and hero logo
- Quick Preview overlay with numbered badges and keyboard hints
- Branded AI Transform popover
- File Converter with format-colored pills
- Drag & Drop Shelf with gradient selection
- Diff viewer with amber/moss/rust color language
✍️ Screenshot Editor
- New Inspector panel (260pt) — edits selected annotation or active tool
- Per-annotation editing for: color, width, opacity, fill, stroke style
(solid / dashed / dotted / dash-dot / dash-dot-dot), arrowhead style
(closed triangle / open triangle / diamond / circle / none), brush style,
pin shape, spotlight shape, blur mode, shadow, corner radius - Text: bold, italic, alignment, background color with 6 quick presets,
contrast-aware default background - Text box sizing with S/M/L/XL presets
- Sketch mode for arrows
- Branded snap guides (amber dashed)
- Fixed: line/arrow move when clicking the middle of the shaft
- Fixed: crop controls lost during earlier refactor — restored in slim bar
⚡️ Performance
- Adaptive clipboard polling backoff (500 ms → 1 s → 2 s when idle)
- Granular Combine subscriptions — toggling a setting no longer rebuilds
the whole menu + every hotkey - App icon cache now capped at 15 MB (was unbounded)
- Popover opens instantly (animation off + pre-warmed view hierarchy)
- Hover highlights snap-in instead of animating — feels native
- Cached list partitions (no more 4x filters per render)
- Event-driven Dock Preview exit — no polling when cursor is stationary
🪟 Dock Preview
- Windows 11–style rise-in reveal with subtle spring overshoot
- Inline title bar inside each thumbnail (close / minimize / move-to-display)
- Numbered badges (1–9) for keyboard switching
- Amber active-window indicator with glow
- Better hover delay (500 ms default) — no more accidental opens
- Instant close when cursor leaves the safe zone
- Amber-tinted border gradient, keyboard hints footer
🛡 Privacy & Permissions
- New Privacy settings pane
- Live status for Accessibility, Screen Recording, Automation
- One-click Reset All Clippy Permissions (runs
tccutil reset)
— fixes the "reinstalled the app and permissions are stuck" nightmare - Clear rationale for every permission, Required vs Optional badges
- Quick-open links to the right macOS Privacy pane
🐛 Bug Fixes
- Text annotation no longer starts with a hardcoded red background
- Sketch mode now actually renders sketchy strokes for arrows
- Stroke styles (dotted, dash-dot, etc.) now visibly distinct — butt caps
instead of round, dash pattern scales with line width - Duplicate detection no longer incorrectly skips fresh captures
- Detail window now always appears centered on the popover's screen,
never spawning off-screen on multi-display setups - Text cursor works throughout the entire editor area
- Clipboard cards never shrink-wrap around short text when the user
manually sized them - "Save Changes" button no longer wraps its label vertically
🧯 Stability
- Fixed EXC_BAD_ACCESS crash when closing Onboarding
- Fixed "Index out of range" when mutating text annotations
- Removed duplicate compile errors in EditorInspectorPanel
📦 Installation
Download the .dmg below, drag Clippy.app into /Applications, and
launch. On first open you'll see the new 3-slide onboarding.
Upgrading from v1.x? macOS may show a stale permission entry. Open
Clippy → Settings → Privacy → Reset All Clippy Permissions for a
clean state, then re-grant as prompted.
🙏 Thanks
To everyone who tested, reported bugs, and pushed for more — this one's
for you.
— Mehmet