Technology Tuesday: Click.to Save Yourself Time

I love how on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, everything seems “clickable.” Looking at a picture you want to share? Long-press and share to twitter! Phone number embedded in an email that you want to dial? Tap to dial! Document that you want to share? Press to email. Everything is seemingly a tap or a swipe away.

Why can’t we have the same simplicity for desktops and laptops? There’s tons of single purpose solutions out there. For example, likely you may have a browser add-on that can look up dictionary definitions when selecting a word. Or perhaps you have a Google Voice extension that turns phone numbers into a click-to-dial link. Or maybe you even took my advice and used Dropbox Automator to re-size pictures or send books to your Kindle.

But what if there was a single solution that can completely change your workflow on PC and Mac and save you multiple steps of clicking, highlighting, and pasting? While there are lots of solutions that work exclusively in the browser, click.to is a solution that can “hyperlink” text, images, documents, videos and other files and send them to other applications effortlessly.

In a nutshell? Click.to works for both Mac and PC and offers a work-flow to reduce the time, effort and amount of clicks to getting text or files from your computer into other applications: In essence, it turns your Copy function into time saving Macros. It works across a massive variety of file types and services.

How do I use it? Download the app and answer a couple of quick questions on how you’d like the application to be configured. Should take you less than a minute. Now, when you copy something, regardless if you are in a browser, on your desktop, in a PDF or Word document, click.to will be ready for action.

So for example, there’s a picture on my desktop that I want to upload to Twitpic. Typically, I’d open my browser, navigate to Twitpic, login, click “upload,” click “select media,” navigate to desktop, find file, click “open,” and click “upload.” Not a major big deal and not a major time commitment BUT with click.to, the whole process goes like this: right-click picture and choose Twitpic from my “Satellites.” Done. Multiply dozens of other such actions throughout the day and then this can be a major timesaver.

Satellites are what click.to calls the modules that simplify your click & paste functions that can be personalized to the services you use most and anchored to the side of your screen. They are visible after you have copied something (Either Right-click + copy or Ctrl+C or  ⌘+C). How long they stay visible and which side of the screen they appear on are configurable by user. In my case, I have them pop to the top of the screen for three seconds. If there are certain applications that you never want the satellites to appear for, that is an option. Additional services that are not displayed by the satellites are invoked by clicking the “More” button all the way to the right. Only relevant Satellites will appear. For example, an Amazon search will not show when copying a video file but will when selecting text.

So if you are reading Hidden Track and come upon a blog entry about the upcoming documentary focusing on the amazing Colonel Bruce Hampton and are interested in learning a bit more about him, you can simply highlight his name and click the Wikipedia satellite. Similarly, I could highlight the entire article and hit the GMail satellite to have a new message composed with the Subject Line being the location that I copied from and the body populated with the text of the article ready to be sent.

[Wikipedia “Satellite” indicated]

What services does it work for? There are dozens and dozens. From uploading pictures to Flickr, to uploading documents to Box.com (formerly box.net), to Google searches, to EBay to Amazon to Evernote to Google Maps and everything in between. Chances are, many of the services that you use daily will have plug-ins available for click.to. One that I’ve used most often is Outlook to quickly compose email and attach a file (something I do dozens of times per day). Another extremely handy one is PDF to quickly turn a document into a PDF without having to open the native application and File-Print to PDF. One click and done!

[Sample of available services that are configurable during setup]

Cool things:

• Service not available? Create your own easily! Not every obscure site will have an actions available, simply follow the instructions and create your own. No programming or expertise required.
• Google Translate works particularly well. Highlight the foreign text and choose Google Translate function and have your text quickly and effortlessly pasted onto Google Translate with the language already auto-detected and translated for you.
• Free! No subscription, enrollment, account creation or email needed
• Private Your data does not get stored anywhere other then where you send it. Click.to doesn’t need to keep a copy.
• Set a keyboard shortcut to satellites This is awesome.I have click.to set to show my Satellites with the ALT+Z combo. Very handy and useful for quickly accessing certain tasks and simply typing in the text if you don’t have it to copy. It’s like having a quick launch dashboard on your desktop without having to open browser.
• Skype Calls Highlight a phone number and Skype module dials number (regardless of format of number!)
• Stats Check out the Statistics menu from the taskbar icon to see how many times you’ve invoked each module. 59 Outlook attachments leads the pack for me. (15 Wikipedia Searches, 8 GMail, 2 Google Maps, etc.)