Here’s a trick with a took that I’ll bet 99% of MacUsers don’t even know they have. It’s “Summarize” and it can be found in the Services menu in any program that can take advantage of it. I use it in Safari and TextEdit all the time.
To use it from what ever program you have that contains a lot of text you don’t necessarily want to read through (like one of my long long posts in Safari) you drag to highlight the text you want to summarize and then clicking on the name of the program in you are using in the menu bar you go down to the services selection and select “Summarize”.
When you do that a window opens up with the text you had just highlighted in it. From two radio buttons there you then select if you want you summary based on sentences or paragraphs and then adjust a slider to get a summary in a length of text that work for you.
It will only works in Cocoa applications which is most Mac applications but not all of them (notably Firefox), but the work around for that is to copy and paste text from the non-Cocoa apps into something like TextEdit and then Summarize what you want to.
The MacBreak video blog has a short bit on Summarize too if what I saying here isn’t clear enough.
by: J. Jerrald Hayes
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