OS X

Summarizer: the little known life-saver

By Steven Coburn ⋅ June 2, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Even the geekest of the Mac geeks done know everything about their Mac. This is what makes things fun. Although its all ways fun to be going through small, little known utilities and things of the like on rainy days, you can’t ever seem to be able to explore all of your Macs folders and menus.

One of the Macintosh’s coolest, least known, and most useful is a little tool called Summarize. Its concept is simple: provide a built in way to summarize pieces of text on the Mac. Just highlight a section of text, may it be a report you typed in Pages, or a blog post from Safari, just highlight it, go to the Application menu, Services, then click Summarize. You can then use the slider and buttons to select how much you want to summarize and if you want sentences or paragraphs (for larger things like Wikipedia articles for instance). Watch as your text is summarized in real time, then when your happy, you can save the file anywhere you want as an RTF (Rich text format) or just copy and paste.

The Summary Service does an amazing job of accurately summarizing your text for easy consumption, or, as I find it most useful, helping me write excerpts for blog posts (what a person sees about your post before they click it to read the full article) For example, it compressed MacFocus Magazines about page down to “MacFocus Magazine began as an idea to fill a need within the teen media community, and within a week from that idea, MacFocus Magazine launched with it’s very first issue ever.”- quick and to the point. I also found a full copy of the Charles Dickens book, “A Tale of Two Cities” and had it summarized down to one sentence: “But, this time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.” Pretty expressive eh?

Tags: Service, Summarize, Summarizer