This week I’m pleased to welcome back PopClip as a sponsor. PopClip brings that iOS popup menu that you love on your iPhone to your Mac. 

Not only can you use the the built-in PopClip tools, there is an extension system and lots of smart people have built clever little extensions I use every day. For example, if you like Fantastical, there is a PopClip extension that runs your selected text through the Fantastical text parser. I thought I’d use this opportunity to show off some of my favorite PopClip extensions.

Display as Large Type

This is useful for putting some bit of information across your screen when you need to see it across the room, like when dialing a phone.

Dial Phone Number

Speaking of phones, this one dials the selected phone number on your iPhone. It only appears when you select a series of numbers that looks something like a phone number and it and feels like you are living in the future.

Word Count

Quite often I’ll take a writing job that has some expectation concerning word count. This plugin tells me how I’m doing.

Paste and Match Style

So useful. Every day.

Upper Case

There are a few things I do that require uppercase. PopClip is the fastest way I know how to turn a block of selected text into all uppercase.

TextExpander

Whenever I catch myself writing something repeatedly, I select it and fire off this PopClip extension to turn it into a snippet.

Speak Text

There is a running bit in the Sparks house where my computer gives my children bad advice. I used to do this through the AppleScript editor. It is so much faster to pull this trick off with PopClip.

Smart Quotes

Yes. I am fiddly about quotation marks in my documents.

Append

This is handy when pulling multiple bits of text from different places for pasting into a single place. 

You’ll notice not pictured are the traditional cut, copy, and paste buttons. After years of training I nearly exclusively pull those tasks off with keyboard shortcuts so I decided to kick them off my PopClip bar and make room for more interesting tools.

This is just a sampling. There are a lot more PopClip extensions right here. There is a free trial so go check it out now. PopClip is one of my favorite utilities and, after trying it, I bet it will be one of your favorites too. 

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