- Ahh, I just did it again. How many times have you sat down and been typing away, especially if you're like me and you look at your fingers when you type, and you have accidentally hit the caps lock key on the damn keyboard, and when you go to look at the document you're about to send or the email you're about to send, half of it's in uppercase and half it's properly cased? Ugh, I have a solution, today, on "Dotto Tech." Steve Dotto here, how the heck ya doin' this fine day? Today we're gonna take a look at a simple little utility that I've found that does, as do so many great utilities, does one thing for me that makes it essential in my tool kit, and then I've found some other things that it does for me as well. Now it's called PopClip, and it's only available for the Mac, but worry not Windows users. There is a tool I've found in Windows which looks to me to be identical to PopClip, and it's called Pantherbar. Now I haven't tested out Pantherbar, but any Windows users who have used Pantherbar, please tell us in comments below if it works as well as PopClip does for the Mac. But I can tell you, PopClip is one of the tools that whenever I get a new computer, I install right away, just for one thing, for one thing only, and that is what I talked about at the very top. You're typing away, and the accidental implementation of the caps lock key. So you end up in all uppercase, of course. If you send it as a social post, you're shouting at everybody. So you backspace over it and retype it. It's a frustrating waste of time. Half the time, I gotta tell you the truth, half the time when I go to retype it, I hit the caps lock key again 'cause I just seem to have a gift for that. PopClip solves that, and it's a fairly ingenious tool. Here's how it works. And it really is a tool that's kind of designed to replace keyboard shortcuts to a certain extent with a visual reference. Here's how it works. PopClip installs as a utility in your computer. Here it is, we see it in the menu bar. And you can see the different actions that it comes kind of stock with. If you go into any document, and you highlight a piece of text, when you highlight the text, PopClip opens up a little menu bar that gives you quick access to a few different functions. And here you can see that I accidentally, or this time on purpose, put this all in uppercase. It's got this little A-B, it's got this little, let's convert it to lowercase. And it goes through and converts it to lowercase, just that easily. I love this feature in PopClip. As I say, it saves me a ton of time. So, how PopClip basically works is it extends way beyond what we showed you there. And if we open the utility up here, and we go the plus, which allows us to add extra functionality, so you see what it does right now. It's set up to open links and to search and to copy and paste and to do a few other tools, a few other activities, depending on what environment it is being invoked in, basically replacing a lot of keyboard shortcuts in a lot of cases. But here if we go in and click on the plus, it launches the PopClip website and the extensions that are available to you. And if you look through the list of extensions, it's pretty extensive, is the list of extensions, as well as the uppercase and lowercase and capitalizing. Make each word, selected word, start with a capital letter. So if you were doing titles, with the other letters lowercase, that sort of thing. It's got the ability to create, to automatically do translations into different languages, to do, to send a text to Evernote, to do other, all sorts of functional, utilitarian-type actions on the highlighted bit of text. But here is the best part of using PopClip. Let's say that I want to set it up. You know I'm a big Evernote fan, so let's set it up to run with Evernote. Let's just walk through this process. Well the first thing you do is you download it, and then you click to download it, and it downloads it as an extension, and there, it brings it in. When you do that, when you click on the extension, do you hear that? You can hear it install. It gives us a little bleep, which is the most satisfying little installation affirmation that I can think of. So now it's created this Evernote extension. And I actually haven't tested that out. Let's take a look and see how it works. Let's take the same piece of text, I highlight it now, and let's see what happens if we transcend it to Evernote. It will then take, it's kinda like a Web Clipper sort of thing. And it wants to access Evernote. So it's now asking for permission the first time. Oh there it is. It just created an Evernote note with it. Because my Evernote account was already opened, it created and copied that into an Evernote note. Simple, useful, might be something that you do want to use, might be something that you don't wanna use, but it gives you the option. That is, it is that cool. Now the cost for PopClip is $10 at the Mac App Store. I am not an affiliate for PopClip. I just like the tool. So there is no affiliate relationship with me and PopClip. And I think Pantherbar is free. Yeah, it says it's a complete free download. So if you wanna be using this in the Windows side. I think you will find, if you install PopClip, that it quickly becomes one of your favorite utilities. And, be forewarned, I imagine you will waste a considerable amount of time when you first install it, installing all of the extra extensions, and playing with the different extensions that PopClip has. And, good heavens, it is a long, long, long list of extensions that PopClip will put in place for you, should you choose to use it. That's a lot for $10. Now as I say, not an affiliate for PopClip. Don't make any money from it. But I will ask you a favor that if you found this video to be useful, if you found it to be something which is of value, then please, give it a like, please share it with your friends. Let them know about what a cool utility PopClip is. And if you're a Windows user, Pantherbar might well be just as good utility. Check the comments to make sure that it does all of the things that PopClip does. But I give PopClip a couple of thumbs up. It is a very cool, very useful utility that, not only will save your bacon more often than not, but using it sometimes just makes me smile. 'Til next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun stormin' the castle. Seriously, dude, seriously? I'm editing the video, and what do I see? You're diving deep. You've gotta time it better. You can't apologize. Seriously, just take it outside.
