RaMMicHaeL's Blog

About two years ago I introduced the so-called “web buttons” in Textify in the Textify v1.6 meets the web post. In the original implementation, you could configure a button to open a link in one of the following two ways: in a popup window which hosts an IE control, or in the default browser. Using the feature for a while, I discovered that each option has its own drawbacks.

The IE control popup was often slow to load, especially for the Google Translate website. Also, several websites (again, Google Translate is an example) showed an offer to upgrade to a better browser right in the popup. Finally, you had to login to websites separately, since IE is probably not the browser you use daily.

Using the default browser solves the issues above, but the website opens in a new tab for most browsers. That’s too distracting, at least for me, especially when I’m already using the browser and need a quick translation or search.

Textify v1.8 improves the situation by opening the website in a new popup window while using the default browser. Currently, Chrome and Firefox are supported. Chrome provides an option to create a new minimalistic window without the URL bar by using the --app command line switch. Firefox doesn’t provide such an option, but it provides the -width, -height, -new-window command line options which allow to create a small popup window, albeit with the URL bar and the rest of the UI.

In addition to that, it’s now simpler to configure a button to launch a custom command, be it a URL or a program on your computer. Use the “More settings” button in Textify for details.

Textify is a tool which allows to select and copy text from many places in Windows where it’s not possible otherwise. This includes error messages, dialogs, lists, and even elements of the taskbar. Since its release in March, Textify hasn’t seen much new functionality, but there’s one feature which I had in mind for a while: integrating web services with Textify. Textify could then be used for quick actions such as translating text, searching the web, looking up a word in a dictionary, and many more, which can be quite handy.

Finally, I’m happy to announce that I’ve dedicated some time to implement this functionality in Textify v1.6. Here’s a short demonstration gif:
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Have you ever wanted to copy some text from a dialog box which doesn’t provide such functionality?
Textify was created to solve this problem: you can point your mouse over the text, click on the mouse shortcut (Shift + Middle click by default), and get a selectable view of the text.

Download

textify_setup.exe (583.02 kB, changelog)
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