Last year, Apple announced OS X Lion at its ‘Back to the Mac’ event. The focus of the event was how Apple had learnt from iOS and managed to improve OS X by incorporating features from it into Lion. The developers at Pilotmoon Software decided to take cue from it and went a step ahead further and brought the familiar Copy/Paste bar from iOS to OS X with PopClip for Mac.
PopClip is a neat little bar that makes copying/pasting text faster and easier on your Mac. One doesn’t have to jump to the keyboard right after selecting a piece of text to be able to copy it. The bar pops up after selecting the text and lets you copy it with a single click. Press and hold the mouse button for a fraction of a second and the paste icon jumps out of thin air, letting you place your copied text right at that cursor position. The size of the bar can be adjusted in the preferences. Apart from the cut/copy/paste functionality, the developers have added some interesting new features to the bar in the latest version. It now has web search, URL opening, spelling and dictionary integrated. Selected text can be searched on the web with a single click using the search button on the bar. If the selected text is a URL, clicking the link icon opens the link in the browser. The dictionary and spelling feature is self-explanatory. It would have been magical if clicking the dictionary button on the bar popped up the inline dictionary than open the Dictionary app. I hope that is something the developers consider bringing to the app in one of its next iterations.
The Copy/Paste bar was truly a revolutionary feature for iOS when it was first introduced. Looking back, you wonder why Apple themselves didn’t bring it to OS X Lion. Some might argue that sometimes the bar is bit intrusive on OS X as it pops up when you don’t expect it to and they do have a point, but leaving aside this small niggle, it has definitely enhanced my user experience on OS X. If you don’t like the bar popping up when working with apps like Photoshop, just include such apps in the ‘Excluded apps’ list in PopClip preferences. PopClip works with OS X 10.6.6 or later. It is available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store. A double thumbs up to the Pilotmoon Software team for this must-have nifty little app!