Fixing Apples' Broken Clipboard, with Java

The Mac OS X clipboard is infamous for changing the format of bit-mapped images that are pasted to it. These images are typically encoded using a QuickTime Tiff compressor that renders them unreadable on other platforms (e.g. Windows and Linux). This means that Mac users who create screen-shot based Word or PowerPoint documents are not able to view the images in those documents on nonMac platforms. QuickTime is available only under license. As a result, it is not generally available under any of the major open-source versions of UNIX (ironic, considering MacOS X is a kind of Unix). Further, windows' users (even the ones that have QuickTime) cannot decode these images (installing QuickTime is no help). As a result, the QuickTime images in documents are unreadable. This article describes a work-around for the problem, using Java. The code has been tested and shown to work on a variety of platforms (even running under emulation using QEMU and Linux) [QEMU]. The program is distribute...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JOT
• Authors: Douglas A. Lyon
• Keywords: Image, JOT 2008, QuickTime, QuickTime Tiff