Iterations

Word continues to fall on the “essential software for my Mac” list.

When it comes to documents with a lot of formatting, I’m using Pages more often.

Other stuff — like blog drafts, for example, or any kind of web content, or notes, or, well, about 75 percent of what I do with words — gets done in TextEdit.

But TextEdit has always annoyed in one way — no word count.  So, when I wonder just how long-winded a proto-blog post might be, I’ve had no choice but to cut and paste into either my blog’s online editor or Word or somewhere else that will count words for me.  And that’s a pain and a memory hog and all the rest.

But today I found out about something called Nanocount.  It’s a little tiny freeware program, written by a chap named Paul Gorman.  (Here’s his website, as delightfully minimalist as his program.)

All Nanocount does is put a little one-inch window (which you can drag on your screen wherever you want) that keeps current on the number of words in whatever TextEdit file you’re currently working on.  You can select the how often it updates (between 2 seconds and 5 minutes), and choose whether to display word count or character count.

Bravo, Mr. Gorman.  Beautiful.

And the final little irony?  Right below the link on MacUpdate I followed to download the program, was a GoogleAd for Office 2008.

Not clicking through that link today. Sorry. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under 1000 reasons the Internet is cool. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.