ID #1033

Automatic Rejection of Silly PlugIn Icons

Have you ever noticed little graphics showing up in ClipMate when you launch particular programs?  The problem is, plug-ins like Acrobat use the clipboard to copy and paste themselves onto various toolbars.  This bad programming practice is spreading, so we have introduced an experimental filtering routine in 6.2.08.  It works by the following criteria:

The graphic appears to be owned by WINDOWS, much like a screenshot would.  This is partially due to the cowardly nature of these plug-ins, as they do not properly identify themselves to the clipboard.
The graphic is smaller than 4096 bytes.  A legitimate screenshot would be many times larger.
This should take care of most addins to Microsoft Office apps, such as the Acrobat add-in.  Unfortunately it does not yet handle the icon for Visual Basic 6.  This is the yellow database icon, and it does not clear the clipboard when it runs, so the clipboard appears to be owned  by whichever application last updated the clipboard. So there could, in fact, be a legitimate small bitmap from Paint, PsP, etc., on the clipboard, and ClipMate cannot tell that from the junk icons, so for VB6, this trick will not work.  You can, however, usually avoid it by selecting any text clip in ClipMate before launching VB.  That is another solution, although manual.

This function is always turned on, as there has not yet been any need to have it be optional. But if you find that it causes problems in a particular scenario, let us know. 

When this function detects and rejects the icon, it will silently log it in the event log at the bottom of ClipMate Explorer.  It will say something like nussiance icon silently rejected.  There will be no pop, boing, or other ceremony.

 

Tags: -

Related entries:

You can comment this FAQ