Citrine Clipboard Project

The Citrine Clipboard Project is investigating how to improve the cut-copy-paste interaction technique. It is part of the Radar project at Carnegie Mellon University.

[Download the Citrine Clipboard system (566 KB, install file)]

The current version is v1.0.5 and was released on 11/8/2004 (see the version history). It now will parse bibtex format, such as provided by the ACM Digital Library.

The included Outlook plugin has been tested in Outlook 2003 and XP, and requires the .NET framework.

The included Palm Desktop plugin has been tested with Palm Desktop version 4.1, and requires the .NET framework.

A related application, the Citrine Phone Dialer, allows the dialing of copied phone numbers. Its novelty — and usefulness — comes from automatically learning and applying dialing rules. It watches how you dial different phone numbers and uses this to infer a set of dialing rules, which it uses to automatically suggest how to dial phone numbers copied to the clipboard. For example, it can figure out to dial 9 before outgoing calls, to include area codes when dialing long distance numbers, to only dial the last five digits for in-house calls, and other such rules.

[Download the Citrine Phone Dialer (148 KB, stand alone executible)]

The current version is v0.8.1 and was released on 2/27/2004 (see the version history).

The Citrine Clipboard Tutorial is a walkthrough on how to use most of the main features in the Citrine Clipboard. (It is also included with the Citrine Clipboard download.)

You can send questions or comments to Jeffrey Stylos (jsstylos at cs.cmu.edu).

Jeffrey Stylos, Brad A. Myers, Andrew Faulring. "Citrine: Providing Intelligent Copy-and-Paste." ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST'04, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM. pp. 185-188.

Abstract:

We present Citrine, a system that extends the widespread copy-and-paste interaction technique with intelligent transformations, making it useful in more situations. Citrine uses text parsing to find the structure in copied text and allows users to paste the structured information, which might have many pieces, in a single paste operation. For example, using Citrine, a user can copy the text of a meeting request and add it to the Outlook calendar with a single paste. In applications such as Excel, users can teach Citrine by example how to copy and paste data by showing it which fields go into which columns, and can use this to copy or paste many items at a time in a user-defined manner. Citrine can be used with a wide variety of applications and types of data and can be easily extended to work with more. It currently includes parsers that recognize contact information, calendar appointments and bibliographic citations. It works with Internet Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Palm Desktop, EndNote and other applications. Citrine is available to download on the internet.

Download:

(pdf)

An unpublished longer version of the same paper includes a description of the user study and more details of the implementation. Download longer version:

(pdf)

Brad A. Myers, Jeffery Stylos, Andrew Faulring. "The Citrine Intelligent Copy and Paste System." ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST'04, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM. To appear.  4:44 minute video.

Download:

(quicktime format) (57 megabytes)

Brad Myers
Jeffrey Stylos
Andrew Faulring
Lawrence Lee

Technology Research News article, "Copy-and-paste goes natural", January 2005

"Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have built a tool that uses natural language parsing techniques to reduce the formatting that must be done when text is copied from one application, like email, and pasted into another, like an address book."

This is part of the Radar project at Carnegie Mellon University.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. NBCHC030029.

We have a whole string of systems mostly named after gemstones. See the acronym list. Citrine stands for: Clipboard Interaction Techniques that Recognize Information such as Names and Events.

From Jewelry Central: "Citrine is one of the most affordable gemstones, thanks to the durability and availability of this golden quartz. Named from the French name for lemon, "citron," many citrines have a juicy lemon color. Citrine includes yellow to gold to orange brown shades of transparent quartz. Sunny and affordable, citrine can brighten almost any jewelry style, blending especially well with the yellow gleam of polished gold".