XBoard v1.00 The clipboard companion for Windows NT and Windows 3.1 Ron Cox October 30, 1993 Registration ============ If you like and use this program, please consider donating $5 to the author. Half of all monies donated in the name of XBoard will be re-donated to the Arizona Humane Society, who do a great job of taking care of the unwanted animals (more and more all the time) in our state. That means if you really like XBoard (or the AZ Humane Society) and donate $20, $10 will be re-donated. Please send to: XBoard Registration C/O Ron Cox 4212 West Cactus, STE 1110-229 Phoenix, AZ 85029 Overview ======== XBoard is a simple little program which sort of acts like a 5 car garage for textual data. The standard clipboard can only really hold one piece of data at a time. What XBoard does is give you 5 bays for holding text which you have cut or copied from another program. Then, at anytime, you can easily instruct XBoard to place text from one of its 5 bays into the clipboard so that it can be pasted into the application of your choice. Manifest ======== This archive contains the following files: xboard.exe - Windows NT version of XBoard xboard16.exe - Windows 3.1 version of XBoard xboard.txt - This document Note: The Windows 3.1 version of XBoard does run under Windows if you have the Win32s extensions installed. Operation ========= You can run XBoard using any of the standard methods used to run other Windows/NT applications. I keep it in the Startup group of the Program Manager so that it runs each time I start my machine. With XBoard running, you will see a small window which has a title bar and system menu, as well as 5 read only edit boxes. Each edit box (bay) is used to hold an individual piece of text. Under Windows 3.1, the size limit of each bay is 64K. Under Windows NT it should be limited only by virtual memory, but I believe that the Microsoft Foundation Classes place an arbit- rary limit of 1 Meg (haven't confirmed this, although I have placed over 200K of text in one of the bays). So, how to use it? From any application you can cut/copy text (including Word, notepad, Excel, etc, etc), cut or copy some text to the clipboard. Then, give a right mouse click over the bay on XBoard in which you want to store that text. You will see the text appear in the bay. Any special characters (non-printable) will show up as hollow boxes, including linefeeds and carriage returns. Each bay in XBoard will only display the first 18 characters, although the bay actually holds all of them. Becareful when right clicking over a bay, XBoard will replace the contents of the bay with the current contents of the clipboard, so make sure thats what you want to do! Note that if the clipboard is currently empty or has something other than text in it, XBoard will simply 'beep' at you when you do a right click over one of its bays. When you want to pick up the text from one of the XBoard bays, give a Left mouse click over the desired bay. You may now paste the text which appears in that bay into any application using the paste command for that program. To clear a bay, hold down either shift key and right click over the bay. The contents are cleared without affecting what's currently in the clipboard. When XBoard is closed, it will make sure it remembers where it was placed next time it starts up. If the text in a bay is less than 80 characters and consists of only the ASCII characters from 32 (space) to 126 (~), XBoard will save that bay in the XBOARD.INI file when you close it, so that next time XBoard is run that bay will be restored to its previous contents. This allows you to place short pieces text you use all the time into one or more bays and have them there at all times. If some other application has opened the clipboard and you attempt a put or grab operation with XBoard, you will get a message box telling you that the clipboard is currently locked. The should rarely if ever happen. Known Bugs/Problems =================== - With XBoard in focus (as the top window), pressing escape terminates XBoard. XBoard's main window is actually a dialog box, and it appears to think that it has a "Cancel" button, when in fact it doesn't. Not sure how to get around this -- if anyone knows, please write. Thats all! ========== See, told you it was simple... I developed (and have only run this) in a 1024x768 mode, and the XBoard window is just the right size for me at that resolution. However, if you are running in a lower video resolution (esp. 640x480), it may be much too large. If so, let me know and I will see what I can do... I may release a dynamically resizable version sometime in the future if demand is high enough. I can be contacted at any of the following places: Internet: urjc!rjc@pcg.com rjc@infograph.com roncox@indirect.com 71722.3175@compuserve.com Enjoy! Ron Cox 30, October 1993