Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am pretty excited because I get to show you a very cool utility called PopClip.
PopClip takes any time that we highlight a piece of text, recognizes the fact that we
might want to do something with that text beyond just copying it to our clipboard.
Ultimately, it’s going to go into our clipboard and then go somewhere else.
PopClip enables that all in a single click of the mouse.
It is I think a real stroke of minor genius.
PopClip today on DottoTech.
Now I am a little bit concerned about this demo because it is another one of the way
cool Mac-only apps and I’m going to just throw this out here right now.
I’m sorry to all of my Windows followers.
I wish I had cooler Windows apps to show you but here is the deal – I use a Mac because
of the way I edit my videos.
I use Mac more than I use a Windows machine.
So if there are cool things that I need to show you that are in the Windows world, please
do me and do yourself a favor and post that information in the Comments area below and
then I’ll do more cool demos on cool Windows stuff.
But you’ve got to help me discover them.
That’s the bottom line.
You’ve got to help me discover them.
Now I actually had help discovering this one today.
I was walking my dog Farley as I often do and listening to one of my favorite podcasts
as I often do, Social Media Examiner with Mike Stelzner.
This was a good show.
He was talking about video blogging with Savvy Sexy Social as the blog post of the young
lady who he had on the show.
I think her name’s Amy.
The podcast itself was great, by the way.
They also feature in every show something called their Discovery of the Week.
In this week’s discovery, they discovered PopClip, which caused me to discover PopClip,
which is how I am now sharing PopClip with you.
So here is the story behind PopClip.
It’s an extension for the Mac.
It basically plug’s in much like TextExpander or any other tool.
It appears here on our top menu bar and there it is right there.
You can see PopClip is on and I’ll show you the settings in just a few moments.
What PopClip does is it allows you to select text with your mouse.
Obviously, it’s an operating system that allows you to select text with your mouse
but when you do so, it then brings up a series of options for you to shortcut your way past
copying it to the clipboard and then doing something with it.
Case in point is you might want to copy a piece of text and then move it into your email
software, copy it and then use it to begin or start an email.
This will give you a shortcut to do that process.
Allow me to show you.
I’m just going to go in.
Actually, it’s all a very cool one to begin with.
Here I am in my HootSuite feed.
It’s basically application-agnostic because it runs at an operating system level.
It’s a free to install and test out then it costs $5.
Here’s an example of how I might use it.
Here I’ve got a follower of mine on Twitter who posted in Spanish.
Now I don’t speak Spanish so typically what will happen is I will copy this text and then
I would go over to Google Translate and paste it into Google Translate, turning it into
a multi-step process.
But I can now highlight the text here—do you see how I’m just highlighting?
It helps if I don’t have a spastic mouse.
There we go—and do you see how I have this little icon here?
That’s the Google Instant Translate icon.
I installed this function into PopClip.
When I click on that, it then brings up just a tiny little thing.
“I like the video.”
Oh okay.
So it gave me an instant translation.
Instead of multiple steps, a single step was all it took.
Now how does that all come about?
We download the software and then install in your Apps Directory and then it becomes
basically a utility that appears here in your menu bar.
If we go into this little puzzle icon picture here, this tells you all of the different
pieces that you’ve added onto it.
It’s got the basics already, opening the link, searching, copying and pasting, those
sorts of things.
But then these others here, I’ve actually added this functionality myself.
Sometimes do you ever hit the Caps Lock key?
I hit the Caps Lock key occasionally.
Well, this will turn everything into lower case so rather than having to retype this,
I can just highlight it and turn it into lowercase.
Pretty cool, eh?
I told you this was a cool app.
There’s the Instant Translate that you just saw.
This is a Facebook one.
This will take whatever you highlight and turn it into an instant Facebook post.
That’s pretty darn useful.
How do you add more?
What you do is you just basically click here on the plus or—I’ll click on the plus
and it’ll properly launch it—or click on the Add and it will launch the PopClip
extensions in your web browser.
These are all of the extensions.
Now this is encouraging to me because this tells me that the extensions that we have
aren’t the only extensions that we’re going to have.
It looks like they’re going to be adding more because how you go about adding an extension
is actually really cool.
Let’s add the uppercase to the lowercase.
So I had make everything lowercase because I often hit the Caps Lock but if you wanted
to turn all of the text into uppercase with a single key stroke, click the mouse.
You download the extension.
When you download it, it’ll appear on your desktop just like it is there and then all
you do is you double click on that and you get a little beep and then it appears in PopClip.
I don’t they could’ve made it any easier to add and expand it.
So take a look at some of the spaces and some of the ideas they do.
They have of course Text Transformation such as turning something into quotes, uppercase,
lowercase.
Ah!
This is one I definitely want, character count.
Especially when I’m writing from magazines and newspapers and other things or even doing
Twitter accounts, you want to be able to do character counts and word counts.
Oh, I like that for Twitter.
I just thought of that.
Now you can count your characters for Twitter in whatever you’re raking it in.
Oh, I’ve got them here.
Let’s install and let’s install.
I’m going crazy.
I might have too many PopClip extensions pretty soon.
It will read back what you say.
Of course, there’s the whole translate family that we looked at which was the Instant Translate
but it could also launch directly into Google Translate.
Of course looking up words, doing dictionary-type things is all available to you.
Ah!
Taking what you highlight and sending it to your note app to make a sticky of it, send
it directly as text to Evernote—isn’t that nice?—and along that line, if we go
into the to-do Apps, it will take it and it will send whatever you’ve highlighted into
your to-do apps such as Things to Do, yup, Todoist, the one that I’m currently using
is here, WunderList, other apps that we use, OnTheFocus, which is a Mac-only or a Mac-focused
one.
It will do all of those things.
Social networking, convert whatever you highlight into a Tweet and to send it as a TweetBot.
As we said, I’ve already set up send it to Facebook or send it to LinkedIn.
So are you getting an idea of some of the things that you can do with this simple little
utility?
When you get the free version, they allow you to use it for 150 actions.
Once you’ve used it for 150 actions, you have to purchase the full blown version and
the full blown version is a staggering $5.
As soon as this video is edited, I am buying the full blown version.
Look at this one.
The last one is pretty cool.
Transform the selected text into Google’s top URL for that search so it boing, boing
becomes whatever the top search result is for whatever it is you’re highlighting if
you want a quick shortcut to get to search.
It’s not life changing but it’s something that I bet you end up using and like TextExpander
and some of the other text based utilities, you start to wonder how you ever did without
it once you’ve had it for a little while.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
If you have, there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
First is you can subscribe to this channel.
Second is I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter.
Then you’ll hear about all of our upcoming live events and webinars and courses and other
cool live things that we do around DottoTech.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel.
We are supported by our patrons at Patreon.
If you’re interested in supporting us and finding out what perks are involved because
the perks are indeed awesome, I invite you to stop by Patreon and have a look.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.