Zmina 1.3
Zmina 1.3 keeps shapes, equations and other objects you copy from apps like
PowerPoint, Keynote and Pages. Paste one back from History and you get the
original object, still editable, instead of a flat picture. Objects Zmina used to
skip entirely now appear in History.
- History and Smart Paste show a picture of the object, so you can tell one clip
from another. ⌥↵ pastes that picture on its own when you want the
flat version.
- A few objects carry nothing Zmina can draw. Those show a card naming the app
they came from.
- Some objects also carry text, such as the formula behind a Keynote equation.
Zmina reads it, so search finds the clip by its text, and the usual text
actions are offered on it. Applying one leaves the object alone and saves the
result as a new text clip, so ↵ still pastes the object.
- Where Zmina could draw the object, the actions list also offers “Save picture
as .png file”, “Paste picture as .png file” and “Open in viewer”. Each one
works on the picture, not the object.
- An object takes more room on your disk than a piece of text does, and History
shows you how much when you open one. An object too large to keep whole is
kept as a picture instead.
Currency amounts
Zmina now recognizes currency amounts in the text you copy, such as $1,234.56,
1.234,56 €, EUR 300 and CHF 1’234.56. History marks a clip that has them, and
typing has:money in search finds those clips. A clip already in your history
picks this up when you open it.
Five actions come with it:
- “Sum amounts” totals the amounts, one line per currency. It never converts
between currencies.
- “Mask amounts” replaces every figure with its marker and three stars, leaving
nothing of the number.
- “Extract amounts” rewrites the clip to the amounts alone, one per line.
- “Strip currency markers” turns each amount into the plain number a spreadsheet
will take.
- “Amounts as 1,234.56” and “Amounts as 1.234,56” switch a whole list between
the two ways of writing amounts. Only the digits move. The markers, spacing and
signs stay as they are.
New actions for copied text
- “Clean up formatting” replaces what Word, PDFs and web pages leave behind with
plain keyboard characters: curly quotes and apostrophes, hyphens and dashes
that are not the ordinary one, the single-character ellipsis, letter pairs a
PDF copy fuses together, and non-breaking or odd-width spaces. It also removes
invisible characters, such as zero-width spaces and soft hyphens. It leaves en
and em dashes as they are.
- “Replace em dashes with -” turns long dashes into ordinary hyphens and tidies
the spacing around them. “Clean up formatting” leaves long dashes alone, so use
this one when you want them gone.
- “Remove leading indentation” takes the margin off text copied from a terminal
or a chat window, where every line starts with the same few spaces. It removes
only the indentation the lines have in common, so anything nested inside keeps
its shape.
- “Remove quote prefixes” strips the quote markers off text copied from an email
reply, a Markdown quote or a terminal pager: the ”>” in front of a quoted
message, and the vertical bars some tools draw down the left edge. Lines that
were not quoted stay as they are. Where those characters are the content rather
than a margin, such as in a Markdown table or a directory tree, the action
stays away entirely.
- A new action takes the spaces and dashes out of a number or code written on
one line, for a form that will not accept them: a card number, a phone number,
an IBAN, a license key, a one-time code. It is named for what it will take out,
so it reads “Remove spaces”, “Remove dashes” or “Remove spaces and dashes”.
Ordinary writing, dates, command-line flags, negative numbers and ranges are
left alone.
Paste as a file from History
History can now paste a clip into another app as a file, the way Smart Paste
already could. Where the app you are pasting into accepts attachments (Slack,
Discord, Mail and the like), the actions list offers “Paste as .txt file”, a
typed variant named after what the clip is, such as “Paste as .json file”, and,
for an image, “Paste as .png file” or “Paste as .jpg file”. Long text prefers the
file over pasting inline. Apps that cannot take an attachment, such as a
terminal or an editor, are not offered it, and neither is it offered before you
have allowed Zmina to paste for you.
Also changed
- “Summarize numbers” reads a list written the European way. A clip of 1,50 and
2,50 and 1.234,56 now summarizes as the three numbers it is, instead of six.
Text where the reading is ambiguous is unchanged.
- The “Purge secrets on quit” setting now says what Zmina can and cannot find for
you. It marks the secrets it reads in an item’s text, so a secret inside a
copied object is one to mark yourself, and a picture cannot be marked at all.
What the setting does is unchanged.
Also fixed
- “Deduplicate lines” treated a blank line as a line worth removing, so it
offered itself on ordinary writing that only had paragraph breaks. Blank lines
are now left alone, so the action appears only where something really is
repeated. A gap can widen where a repeated line came out from between two blank
lines.
- In History, queueing only a save action on a text clip, such as “Save as .txt
file”, made the clip’s text disappear from the preview. The text now stays on
screen, and the line above it says “original” rather than “result”.
- The D hint, which switches the preview between the result and a
diff, was offered even where there was nothing to switch to. In History and
Smart Paste it is now dimmed until the actions you have queued produce text. In
Smart Paste, pressing D while it was dim also changed the view, so
the next preview you opened appeared as a diff for no clear reason.
- The scrollbar in History measured only the clips it had loaded, so on a long
history it shrank and slid upward every time you scrolled far enough to load
more. It now measures your whole history and stays put as you scroll. While you
search, it still describes what has loaded.
- A failed update showed only a “Try again” button. It now says whether Zmina
could not reach the update server, the download did not finish, or the new
version could not be installed, and says so where your installed copy is
untouched.
- An update check that stalled on a bad connection, such as a captive portal or a
VPN that had dropped, could block every later check until Zmina was relaunched.
A stalled check or download now gives up after a short wait and reports the
error.
- Entering a license on the trial-expired screen closed the window with no word
either way. It now confirms the activation, naming the plan and the address it
is registered to.
- Summoning Smart Paste or History over a browser that was briefly not responding
could take a second or more. Reading the page address now gives up after a
fraction of a second.
- If Zmina’s history database could not be opened or upgraded at launch, for
example a damaged file or a disk that filled up during the upgrade, Zmina quit
silently. It now explains what went wrong and where the file is before it quits.
- Pasting or copying from Zmina just before the Mac went to sleep, or across a
clock correction, could leave a duplicate of that clip in History. Zmina now
recognizes its own writes on wake too.
- Clicking the paste button in Smart Paste a second time while a slow transform
was still running could paste the result twice. The second click is now
ignored.
- Clearing a large history, or the hourly cleanup on one, could freeze the
History window while it caught up. It now catches up in a single step.
- “Export my history” built the whole export in memory before writing it, so a
very large history could bring Zmina down partway through. It now writes clip
by clip, and a failed export no longer leaves a half-written file under the
name you chose.
- A History window left hidden for a long stretch kept every clip captured in the
meantime in memory, and slowed a little with each one. It now keeps only as
much as it shows.
- Launching Zmina after a long stretch unused, with automatic history cleanup on,
could leave it with no menu bar icon while it cleared out old clips. The
cleanup now runs in the background and Zmina is ready straight away.
Free for anyone still in the trial, and free for everyone who already bought
Zmina. Update from inside the app, or download 1.3.
