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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

The ability to highlight/copy/etc text on Macs/iOS these days is such a killer feature. I use it almost every day, both for copying/translating text in screenshots or taking photos of text to then copy it into my notes later (eg school notice boards or event posters etc).

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Windows built-in snipping tool (shortcut Win + Shift + S) also has a text actions button to extract text.

Or Powertoys does that even better: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...

I am using this tool all the time and I did not know this! Thanks!

I have to say, the ability to quickly copy and paste between macbook and iphone is such a great flow

Totally agree. It’s one of those features that feels like magic. So handy for those digital purchase codes you get with blu-rays.

Yup - I recall when this feature was released, maybe a dozen years ago, with KDEConnect. Real QoL improvement. Glad to hear some other OS's are catching up.

Apple's had Universal Clipboard since 2016 (so 9 years) with macOS Sierra and iOS 10.

It gave me a "living in the future" feeling the day someone sent me a picture of a phone number through imessage. Barely thinking, I pressed on the phone number in the image and I was prompted to call it. It was like technology and primitive intuition teamed up to create that moment.

Part of what makes it so good is that it's everywhere. Preview, QuickLook, QuickTime Player (yes, videos get OCR'd too!), any app that uses the system frameworks for displaying media.

This includes Safari, where not only do images (inline or otherwise) have selectable text, but the built in translator leverages that text and uses it to translate images, too! This is super useful for translating Japanese webpages in particular, which tend to have tons of text baked into images.

I use Shottr, I take a screenshot of a screenshot and hit “O” immediately after. Saves me from first saving the file to open it in the native viewer

I have Shottr keyboard shortcut (cmd+opt+control+o) setup to allow me to OCR from whatever is on the screen and copy the text to clipboard. So whether someone shares code or error log as screenshot on slack, it’s 3 steps: 1. cmd+opt+control+o 2. select the area to OCR 3. cmd+v in vscode or google

this. makes me wish more image viewers would ocr->png special field->have location-attached selectable text like a pdf

OneNote had this for a long time.

Aside from copying text from images, OneNote can also make text in images searchable.

Spotlight, notes, and Photos also look at photos and return them in search result. Even going further where you can give a description and find it as well.

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