ShoveBox: Tom’s Budget Software Pick

ShoveBox is a snippet manager that resides in your Mac’s menu bar. Just what is a snippet manager? Snippets are small scraps of information you come across as you use your Mac each day. For example, when searching the web you might come across a few URLs you want to save, but not as bookmarks. Snippets can also be scraps of text, images, PDFs, or web archives.

Using ShoveBox is as simple as dragging the snippet to the ShoveBox menu item in the menu bar. ShoveBox will take over from there, and either copy the item into its inbox or organize it according to rules you set up, much like the rules in Apple Mail.

ShoveBox’s real strength is in organizing all those scraps of information. If all you want to do is capture snippets of information, a dedicated folder on your desktop could serve that purpose. The problem with a dedicated folder is that it will quickly fill up with unrelated snippets, making it difficult to find a specific piece of information. ShoveBox uses rules to automatically sort and categorize snippets. You can create complex rules that will sort the snippets and drop them into folders you create, and label them with a color or mark them with a flag. You can even run a separate script to further automate the process. For example, you could have a rule that checks to see if the snippet you’re saving is a URL and if the title contains the word Mac. If it does, Snippet can put the URL in a special Mac folder. Then, whenever you want to browse Mac-related URLs that you thought were interesting, you just need to look in the Mac folder in ShoveBox.

ShoveBox is available for $24.95 from Wonder Wrap Software. A demo version is available for downloading.

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