[malique]

Hey,

just discovered a new app - Summarize. Did u know it? Choose some text anywhere and right-click -> Services -> Summarize.

Check it out. Anyone ever used this by purpose? Is there a real USE of this app?? Just curious


See ya..

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by malique:
Hey,

just discovered a new app - Summarize. Did u know it? Choose some text anywhere and right-click -> Services -> Summarize.

Well, you click Services from the Application menu...

But wow, this is kinda neat... hehe. Good find, malique.

[gorickey]

Wow, LOL...never seen that before.

Nice.

[SteevAK]

i've known about it but never have used it beyond figuring out what it does. Kinda cool.

[ShotgunEd]

I remember this was a feature that was wowed at when OSX was just out. I've never used it myself.

[Gee4orce]

There's another hidden gem : FileMerge.

It's in the developer tools, and it's essentially just a front end to the Unix diff command - but I've never been able to understand diff output, and FileMerge is just sooooo slick !

It shows you the differences between two text files, with synchronised scrolling that sort of 'elastic bands' between the two files. Too hard to explain, you should try it.

If you use CVL (a GUI application for CVS) it calls FileMerge for showing differences between revisions. This is just so slick that it blows away my unix developer collegues

[Sal]

Summarize has been around since Mac OS 9. It is also available as an AppleScript command and can be used to provide a summary of text.

From the Standard Additons dictionary:

Code:
summarize: Summarize the specified text or text file
	summarize  anything  -- the text (or an alias or file reference to a text file) to summarize
		[in  integer]  -- the number of sentences desired in the summary
	Result:   plain text  -- a summarized version of the text or file

[GRAHAMUK]

Originally posted by malique:
Hey,

just discovered a new app - Summarize. Did u know it? Choose some text anywhere and right-click -> Services -> Summarize.

Check it out. Anyone ever used this by purpose? Is there a real USE of this app?? Just curious


See ya..

I knew it was there but I feel it lacks a couple of essential things which would make it an everyday tool:

WORD Count and CHARACTER count of the original selection as well as the summary itself. These in themselves don't sound like much but how often has a website given you a text entry field limited to x characters yet do not provide a way to check x? And fitting/editing articles to a particuclar length is usually given as a word count.

[Appleman]

Sometimes you see books in the bookstore with titles as "All the secrets of China".

That's impossible since they are no secrets anymore...

so your hidden app: same same

There are more "hidden apps", like the scripts for making a webpage, like making a show, in both cases just drop some pics on it and you either get a webpage or a photo show.

[Anand]

Its in the same location as the apple spell check. The icon is pretty neat as well. Not quite sure what it does but if you go to sevices in the finder and just click on services, it opens it up really quickly.

[OwlBoy]

Neato, I love the icon.

-Owl

[Mithras]

That's file:///System/Library/Services/SummaryService.service for those using Safari.

[CheesePuff]

The icon looks great!

I've used this once before a few months back but found no real use for it for me at least.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by GRAHAMUK:
I knew it was there but I feel it lacks a couple of essential things which would make it an everyday tool:

WORD Count and CHARACTER count of the original selection as well as the summary itself. These in themselves don't sound like much but how often has a website given you a text entry field limited to x characters yet do not provide a way to check x? And fitting/editing articles to a particuclar length is usually given as a word count.

There's actually a Terminal command devoted to this: wc (short for Word Count). It's been in Unix for many years.

Plain wc gives you a word count. Add -l to get lines and -m for characters (note, though, that this trips up on Unicode).

No, this isn't as good as a full-blown Service would be, but at least the code is there.

[lookmark]

Originally posted by GRAHAMUK:
I knew it was there but I feel it lacks a couple of essential things which would make it an everyday tool:

WORD Count and CHARACTER count of the original selection as well as the summary itself. These in themselves don't sound like much but how often has a website given you a text entry field limited to x characters yet do not provide a way to check x? And fitting/editing articles to a particuclar length is usually given as a word count.

One (or two) extra steps, but check out Word Services 2.4 for word and character count. Completely free, shift-command-I on any text. And much more. Best 57K of Services you'll ever download.

[GRAHAMUK]

Originally posted by lookmark:
One (or two) extra steps, but check out Word Services 2.4 for word and character count. Completely free, shift-command-I on any text. And much more. Best 57K of Services you'll ever download.

Thanks for the tip - just installed it. At 57K, who can argue?

[Jerommeke]

pretty useless. in english it leaves one sentence which is hardly readable and everything in dutch 'cannot be summarized'

[rytc]

Originally posted by Jerommeke:
pretty useless. in english it leaves one sentence which is hardly readable and everything in dutch 'cannot be summarized'

Then increase the number of sentences that you want it summarised to, and automatic computer generated summaries are never going to be as good as human ones - well not until computers are a lot more advanced than they are now. Its hardly suprising Dutch doesn't work, unless someones written it for the language, its not going to work properly.