The 13 Days of the New Year - Shareware I Want To Find; or a Hint or Three

By Harry {doc) Babad

There are those of us who are addicted to shareware – compulsively checking Version Tracker of the MacUpdate site for new toys. But in all of our lives there comes a moment when we realize that even the prolific world of share-freeware development is not perfect or complete. No I’m not talking about product that rate 3.5 macCs or below. I’m talking about tools we’d like that either no one had developed yet or which we haven’t found. Therefore this article.

Readers, should you find an application out in the great untamed Internet that meet one of the listed needs, let us know. We’ll even give you a chance to review it if you’d like to contribute to macC. So here’s the rest of my story

1.         A Reward Posted: Wanted a PDF Macro Tool for Reformatting Downloaded items – At time I download a series of recipes from a site. All the recipes are formatted identically. But because the website doesn’t have a printer friendly link all of a group of downloads contain too much; any is too much, side bar material. I’d like a PDF oriented macro tool in which I can cleanup one recipe by recording my actions, creating an appropriate template or script. I could then apply the macro to the rest of the recipe set. I’ve done this in MS Word, now why can’t someone help do it in Acrobat or a stand-along PDF tool. One at a time is a real drag.

2.         A Simple Visually Oriented (no shifting pixels) Finder Window Size, View, Location Control — A haxie that forces the Finder to opens new or existing windows either in List or icon view with the with the side bar, as a default setting, closed! But the resulting window should retain the bottom strip that tells the user that there are X items and Y GB available. Item count is more important a GB remaining.

3.         A Universal Menu Short Cut Assignment Tool – I’d like it also to be as easy to assign a keyboard shortcut in the Finder or any other application as it is in MS Word. Tools > Customize > Customize toolbars and Menus > Commands > Press the Keyboard Button. Find the item check the present commands and change what you want to customize. Note should I get this gift in ’07, anyone who uses my computer will be as dismayed, as those who use shortcuts in my highly customized version of MS Word. [Heck, there's always the restore the original… option. I know there are tools for creating menu shortcuts, but I’d not found one that I liked. Hmmm, something that is so simple even doc in his dotage can handle it without as manual.

4.         A Universal Tool Bar Configuration Tool – I’d like it to be as easy to assign a keyboard shortcut in the Finder or any other application as it is in MS Word. Tools > Customize > Customize toolbars and Menus > Commands. To change your toolbar arrangements drag and drop the items where you want them to be. You can create new toolbars or move any and all toolbar items around to suit your work style. I hope the folks at Unsanity see this… they make great Haxies.

5.         Allow Creating a Document In a Blank PDF Page; Just Make it Possible — A tool that allows easy transfers of either graphics or text from any document (PDF or Wood processor or graphics program) to a blank PDF page. To reach my desired end result I mist not do the layouts in MS Word (or equivalent program) and convert the product to a PDF. I can use the hand tool to paste a graphic image into a blank PDF, but have not figured out how to add text, formatted or otherwise, to the blank PDF page without first converting it to a graphic file. But then resulting text (image) cannot be edited with the touchup text tool. Even using Acrobat’s OCR feature will not allow editing of the pasted graphic unless it is put in as a note.

6.         A Seeing Eye Dog for MS Word — It seem that every time I add a new security update to MS Office (Word in this case) it seems to forget where it keep backup files. Anyone for a fix, software patch or even a hint would be welcome. More often than not, this occurs after I save a file and then decide to quit Word.

7.         Cold Fusion of a PDF Would Be Great — Two half pages Should Equal One but isn’t for PDF Files — Wanted, a tool that allows the fusion of two trimmed half page PDFs in to one page document. I’ve been able: (1) tediously to transfer information from one page of a PDF to another, to consolidate the contents, but I have not been able to simply fuse two pages into one by selecting them and maybe giggling overlays.

8.         Eudora Safari Please — Someone make a plugin to allow me to send email via my Eudora client in Safari. Now that Eudora has become an open source product, I have even more reason not to abandon it.

9.         Easy Find Enhancements — I’d like to be able to drop a file directly into a folder found when doing a Find File search. At present to do that one need to go to the five (command-R (Apples find original of an alias command) and manually drop the document into the original folder. This is an otherwise great program that I rely upon; conscientiously ignoring Spotlight. Perhaps more difficult, would be the ability to drop a document found in a files-folders search into a fold that it should go in – one identified in the search results window.

10.      MS Word Paste Options {Smart Button} Default Maker Tool — MS Word has an annoying habit of asking (it’s a little icon) whether a paste should be reformatted to the present document. I’ve not figured out how to tell this annoying feature to default to yes keep my present formatting. Any hints. Where is this sucker needed or do I need a hack, not terminal I hope.

11.      PDF Chop-Chopper Wanted — I need the ability to take a long-multipage PDF, say a downloaded web page containing multiple recipes and by placing MS Word” Page break type makers, split it into documents. These individual documents should grab the entire area between individually the capture materials. This is significantly different from simply reversing a combine PDFs action.

12.      Print Setup Utility on Small Amounts of Sleep Potion – A simple haxie that closes the utilities window after I complete converting an MS Word document to a PDF using Adobe Acrobat’s MS Word plugins via PDFMaker.

13.      ShadowGoogle Enhancement — Needed, a mouse-click saver that moves you and a selected system clipboard item to the destination set would be grrreat. The way this otherwise wonderful utility works now is [1] copy something and it adds to the system clipboard, where you can rename it. Since the system clipboard is temporary, ever changing as you cut and paste things, you might want to keep a special clipping in a permanent user defined clipboard, one of many you’ve created. (2) You transfer that clipping to another set (by option clicking and using the pull down menu that lists your sets) to select the new destination. The clipping disappears from the systems set. To get to your new clipping you must transfer to the selected clipping set, via another, provided, pull down menu. An improvement, reducing the number of clicks needed to get to your new clipping would be helpful. If you could both move the clipping and screen window to the new clipping destination, say by holding down an extra modifier key (lets say the control Option or shift option key) it would be wonderful.

It’s your turn. Feedback please.

doc