Clipboard Normalizer

Jeff Kaufman released Clipboard Normalizer, a free menu bar app on the Mac App Store, on September 28th, 2026. The app strips fonts, colors and sizes from clipboard content, keeps only what Markdown can represent, and converts copied rich text to Markdown and back. Kaufman said Claude rewrote the December 2025 script for App Store compatibility, replacing GPL-licensed Pandoc with SwiftSoup, merging the separate Normalize Clipboard and Markdownify Clipboard apps, adding XSS and formatting tests, and guiding him through a review process that failed once before passing on the second attempt.

| Clipboard Normalizer in Mac App Store https://www.jefftk.com/p/clipboard-normalizer-in-mac-app-store | September 28th, 2026 | | | ai https://www.jefftk.com/news/ai , tech https://www.jefftk.com/news/tech | wrote a program https://www.jefftk.com/p/clipboard-normalization to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through https://www.jefftk.com/p/teleoperated-humans things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clipboard-normalizer/id6809465278 : It's now a single menu bar app, which offers a few options: In addition to normalizing your clipboard, it can also convert copied rich text to markdown and back again. Video demo: youtube https://www.youtube.com/v/V1cxkWJH37w It's amazing how much software development has changed in the last few months. In December, when I made the first version, it was simple enough that I think I still wrote it by hand with some asking questions to Claude and then Claude walked me through using Platypus https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus to package the script as a Mac app. This time I just said I wanted it in the Mac App Store and Claude rewrote it to be compatible. This included: - Replacing Pandoc https://pandoc.org/ GPL and so incompatible the the App Store TOS with SwiftSoup https://github.com/scinfu/SwiftSoup . - Writing Swift code to wrap SwiftSoup. - Merging the separate "Normalize Clipboard" and "Markdownify Clipboard" apps into a single menu bar app. - Making it show a little toast describing what it had just done, including an FYI if you tried an impossible conversion. - Adding tests, including ones for XSS and others for very strange formatting. - Fixing a few edge cases the old one mishandled. - Walking me through the App Store review process. I needed to provide a little guidance, in telling it where I wanted to draw the line on which formatting to keep, and I did notice a few small conversion bugs. It failed the review process the first time, mostly because I was lazy and skipped Claude's recommendation to make a demo video. The second time it got through fine. Referenced in: