A Great OS Add-On for Researchers

I’m a regular user of PilotMoon’s PopClip, which adds an iOS like bubble to text selection on OS X, with the standard cut/copy/paste commands plus a variety of special functions. You can for instance select from tex you’re reading and have it opened as a Wikipedia search. Someone just wrote an extension for Unclutter, which led me to take a look at this program. It’s fantastic! I’ve tried a variety of shelf like add-ons in the past. None of them has been as well-thought-out or effective as Unclutter.

I do a lot of academic writing. I’m constantly storing fragments of text and files for later use. Although I am an avid Evernote user, often I don’t want to create a new file for just a small fragment of text. Unclutter gives me a safe temporary holding place for fragments of text, files and pics for later use. The current edition has three panels that form a pulldown across the top of the screen – one is a clipboard history, one for files and pics, and the other a notepad. In the program preferences you can choose to use any or all three of these windows, and also choose where you want data in each of these panels to be stored. The panels are resizable horizontally – I’ve chosen to make the notes area a little larger. Speaking of notes, I’ve also discovered that notes are individually or in total searchable.

The author recognizes the security implications of the program and in the preferences allows the user to designate certain programs as off-limits – for instance I use a program to store passwords, I would not want them to end up in Unclutter. Also worth mentioning is avery helpful Quick Reference that comes with the program and is available either from a small tab at the bottom of the drop-down or from the menu bar icon.

My only suggestions to the author of the program are cosmetic. It comes with two colour schemes, dark and light plus an “automatic mode.” I’m not sure what the automatic mode does – it seems to just default to the “light setting,” regardless of my desktop background or the system’s preference general setting for appearance. It would be nice to have a few more choices. It would also be great to be able to set transparency level. One problem with drop-down panels is that they can hide data that needs to be input. This is also true on the OS 10 drop-down print settings. Finally, it would be nice to be able to adjust the vertical size of the drop-down.

Panegyrist about Unclutter