PopClip is a lightweight Mac utility that improves your ability to work with text. It sits in the menu bar and gives you an iOS-style popup that lets you cut, copy and paste text. You can also search for the selected text, open text links, correct spelling, and more. It's a real time saver once you get accustomed to using it.

That's the problem, though. The biggest drawback to PopClip is not the app, but the user's muscle memory. It was so hard to stop myself from using keystrokes to copy and paste text that I would forget to use PopClip. I saw the PopClip commands, but before I could click them, my hand had already selected command-C. It took some time, but once I made that adjustment from keystrokes to PopClip, I loved having a variety of text shortcuts at my finger tips.

One other mild annoyance is that PopClip sometimes gets in the way when I select text that I'm not going to copy. This happened frequently when I was writing and selected a piece of text that needed a link. PopClip would show up and ask me if I wanted to cut, copy or paste. To minimize this interference, PopClip has an excluded Apps list, but I do most of work in a web browser and I'm not going to exclude Google Chrome. I can also quickly toggle PopClip on and off when I want to create a link, but that's inconvenient, too. In the end, I just learned to ignore PopClip when I didn't need it.

Once I adapted to using PopClip, I discovered that I genuinely like using it. It saves me time and brings a bit of iOS to my desktop. PopClip is available from the Mac App Store for US$4.99.

Daily Mac App: PopClip brings iOS-style copy and paste to your Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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