The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
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January 2, 2002
(This post is from my old, old, super old site. My views have changed over the years, hopefully my writing has improved, and there is now more than a handful of folks reading my site. Enjoy.)

Oh horror of horrors

So I had a great idea for an application one time. I have always wanted to be able to pipe text from the shell to clipboard in Mac OS X, and back out again. So one day I sat down and wrote a little program to do that. I called it toclip. As in it copied stuff to the clipboard.

And it was good.

So then I decided, hey- I could sell this. It might be worth something to someone out there- So I created a little website for it, set up a registration service, and stuck it on Versiontracker for all the world to see and download. And that's what happened.

Versiontracker has a neat little feature though- it lets folks post comments and reviews about the applications that it has listed. That's fine and cool to me, I like that. So I go and see what someone said about my little application, "toclip", and here's what someone wrote- "Hmm, what's the difference between this and the supplied commands 'pbcopy' and 'pbpaste'?"

Um, what's that you say? It's already built into the operating system?

Damn. There goes that idea. I won't be seeing any registrations for that one anytime soon.

But as hard as people could have been on me for making such a dumbass mistake, they weren't really that bad. My favorite comment was this one (in part) : "'Doh!' - toclip's author..."

Doh! is right. Hey- at least at this point <a href=http://versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13024&db=macosx>107 people have downloaded it.