What is Shadow?

Shadow is the brand new clipboard utility for Mac OS X. Clipboard managers have come and gone on the Mac, but Shadow brings a new concept - Copy on one Mac, paste on another! Using Apple's Bonjour technology, a super-fast multithreaded server, and a wickedly simple interface, Shadow will change how you use your Mac workgroup.
Shadow also provides a multi-item clipboard for each Mac it's installed on. If that was not enough, you can add more clipboards if you want, name them whatever you want and store all your clippings in your own categories. You can then decide if you want to share a particular clipboard. If you want to share it with some people, but not others, you can password protect them too! So, even if you only have one Mac on your network, you could still find Shadow invaluable.

How does it work?

Shadow runs a Bonjour service the moment you choose to share a clipboard. Other Macs on your network discover that service and make the clipboard available to view exactly like were on your local machine. Shadow can operate on wired or wireless networks, you don't need to know anything about networking, Shadow "just works".

But I want to share some stuff, but some stuff is private...

In Shadow, you can have any number of clipboards you want. So, I could make a clipboard called "My love letters", and choose not to share it. This means that the clipboard is not available on the network at all, and only on the Mac you are using. Alternatively, maybe I've got another clipboard called "Customer quotes" which I'm happy to share with my colleagues, but maybe not other people on the network. In this case, I'd share the clipboard on the network, but I'd set a password, which I would only tell my colleagues.

Will Shadow slow down my network?

99.999% of the time, Shadow does not use any network traffic at all. Network traffic is only created on discovering a clipboard, viewing a clipboard for the first time, and if you decide to copy a remote clipping into your local clipboard. Even then, for most clippings such as text and small pictures, the network transfer will take less than a second.