While burning the midnight oil writing programs and hacking on a Japanese DOS machine more than 16 years ago, there was one kind of program I really enjoyed - the beautifully written utility.
Utility software often arises from the need a programmer might have to prepare for, or write, a much bigger piece of software. Sometimes, the utility can make more money than the 'big project' (the well-known Stuffit software on the Mac paid for Raymond Lau's Princeton education. Think about that! Peter Norton also began as a utility writer).
I have seen a few excellent utilities in the past 16 years, but none better than CopyPaste. It is a devilishly clever little utility that does a great deal more than simply copy and paste.
Simple to install, CopyPaste appears as a tiny window on the screen, always the top-most window. When users pass the cursor over it, it expands to show 10 buffers and a row of menu tools at the bottom.
Altogether, CopyPaste offers 100 clipboards, arranged in groups of 10, so they do not take up much space on the screen or the menus. When the tiny window is expanded, the first few words of each buffer or clipboard appear, and to the left of that are two large letters - a red 'C' and a blue 'P' (no prize for guessing what they stand for).
If users highlight something in the text they are writing, move the cursor on to the tiny window so it expands, and then click once on a red C, the highlighted text will be copied into the buffer. The reverse will occur if they click on a blue P.