That was a tough headline to write, because it was difficult to summarize what the Click.to app does in one short sentence.
But if you’re a Windows user, I encourage you to check it out anyway (Mac folks will have to wait a couple more weeks).
If you’re anything like me, you use the CTRL-C command a lot. What Click.to does is display an ‘action bar’ whenever you copy something to your clipboard – whether it’s a photo, text or an Excel spreadsheet – that enables you to share the file in question to a variety of social networking and other online services, or other Web-based and even desktop applications.
For example. When the app is running in the background, CTRL-Cing a picture on your desktop lets you easily – and quickly – send the file to your Facebook profile, add it as an attachment to an email you’re sending with Outlook, or open the image in Adobe Photoshop.
Or copy any string of text, whether it’s from a conversation inside a chat window, a Word document or a browser tab, and jump straight to IMDB, Wikipedia or Google search.
It sounds a bit silly, but it’s easy to get hooked on the app because of its sheer speed. Use it for a while and you’ll find that you really do waste a lot of timing performing actions like opening an app and clicking a few times before you can actually share a file.
Click.to can help alleviate that problem.
The pop-up bar that you get every single time you copy something to your clipboard can get annoying fast, though, but fortunately there’s a way to hide it automatically for specific applications (e.g. Skype or Google Chrome). Unfortunately, you can’t hide the bar only for specific Web apps (e.g. WordPress).
Another gripe: Click.to decides which apps you’re most likely to use with any given action, so for examples it hides Twitter and Gmail when you CTRL-C an image, even if that’s exactly where you wanted it to end up.
Other than that, it’s a neat little app that adds value for oversharers such as myself. I particularly like the fact that you can create your own actions in just a couple of steps, which I used to create a shortcut for searching companies in CrunchBase as an example.
In spite of the app’s name and logo, the company behind the tool – Axonic – doesn’t own the click.to domain name, although they’re trying to buy it from the current owner.
Head on over to clicktoapp.com and give it a whirl.
Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH is a privately-owned software vendor focusing on information, communication and recognition technologies. Over the past several years, Axonic’s research and development activities have been focused on the area of communication intelligence - the targeted analysis and simplifying communications. The company, located in Karlsruhe, Germany, was founded by Martin Welker in 2003.
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