PopClip is the best Mac OS X utility there is.
It’s simple, really:
PopClip appears when you select text with your mouse on your Mac. Instantly copy & paste, and access actions like search, spelling, dictionary and over 100 more.
PopClip is basically a Mac version of the iOS share sheet, which you can quickly get at just by selecting text. It looks like this:
What’s Awesome About PopClip
Its very existence is awesome. This short page shows you the extensions with which the app ships–fairly basic, though still helpful, ones.
But it’s all the Actions you can add to it that make it so great. Here are but a few, shown in the menu bar at right, where you can also rearrange the order to customize the appearance.
A few of my favorite things I can do with a single click:
- select text to send to OmniFocus as a task
- save a text selection to Evernote
- select text to send to 2Do as a task
- select the title of a book from a syllabus and find it on Amazon
- do the same thing on ebay
And then there’s some cool power-user stuff, too:
- change selected text to all caps, all lowercase, or sentence case
- calculate a string of numbers (i.e. 4*9+7 magically changes to 43 when I select it and click on the = sign in PopClip)
- count characters and words in a selection (especially helpful for when I’m using OmniOutliner, which doesn’t have a built in word count feature)
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are all the extensions you can add to your own PopClip, a process which is fast and easy.
There are some customizations, too. You can have PopClip not appear in certain apps of your choosing. You can change the size of its pop-up menu. And you can have it start up at login.
A Single Drawback
Just one: you cannot currently sync your added extensions between computers. So if you use two computers, you’ll have to configure evertyhing twice.
How to Get It
PopClip will fill in the gaps of many of your favorite apps by letting you quickly get information into them. It will save you time with things like its spell check, word count, and running a Google or Amazon or Etsy search on selected text. It can even automatically shorten Web links and randomly re-order selected lines of text.
PopClip is easily worth its $6.99. Find it on the Mac App Store here.
Thanks to the good folks at Pilot Moon for the review copy of PopClip, given to me for this review but with no expectation as to its content.
Words on the Word 