Transfz 1.3

There aren’t many grab-bag utilities that do a lot of different, handy things these days, but Transfz is just such a utility, and you will wonder how you lived without it. Consuming hardly any RAM or CPU cycles (the executable is just 320KB), Transfz just sits in the Taskbar tray awaiting its hotkey, and then it leaps into action to make your computing life a little easier.

Before describing what it does, here is how to use it. Just highlight a word or set of words within a document or program, including text fields in Web browsers, and press CTRL-D. A pop-up menu appears that offers all sorts of handy features and commands that work with the selected text.

Arguably, the most useful is an Internet Lookup command, which instantly opens your browser (or a new tab) and Googles for the selected text. If you don’t care for Google, then Transfz can use Wikipedia, IMDb, Slashdot, the BBC, or any of about 10 online searching tools.

The next is a permanent clipboard of which stores and displays the 10 most recent Clipboard items. This allows you to copy several things to the clipboard at once and then paste them all again at once, with no tedious back and forth between windows or applications. There are also text formatting options that can change all the selected text to ALL CAPS, Upper Case, lower case, and so forth. It can also insert the current time and/or date at the cursor, count the number of selected words, or search and replace within your selection.

A small but growing list of plug-ins are adding more features to Transfz almost weekly, and there is no arguing with the price free. But it seems to make keypress sticky within Office 2007. Hopefully this bug will get chased out as the product goes from beta to final.

URL: www.transfz.com