Product Reviews

Anyone who has tried to, say, cut and paste text from a Web page into a Word document, or strip out the garbage characters from a forwarded email, will know just how time-consuming it can be to produce clean, Mac-friendly text from the Internet.

In the past your options were either a series of 'find and replaces' via a text editor to take out the trash - which often leaves the document as one long unformatted paragraph - or manually deleting the unwanted characters one by one. In which case you would probably be better off re-typing it from scratch.

Then along came TextSoap, which nuked all this hassle with a single mouse-click. Simply paste the text you want to clean into the application window, hit the Scrub button and - Shazam! - pristine, squeaky-clean copy you could eat your supper off. So to speak.

The original version of TextSoap was remarkable enough for a $15 shareware program. But the developer, Unmarked Software, hasn't been sitting on its laurels and, within six months of the original's debut, it's already shipping version

The update does nothing revolutionary on the surface - the interface has been cleaned up, AppleScript compatibility has been added, the Open and Save menus have a Mac OS 8 look and feel, users can customise their own cleaning scripts, and there's a new plug-in for BBEdit. But taken together, these additions bring a lot more flexibility and polish to what was originally something of a one-trick pony, albeit an extremely clever one.

Of course, most people won't need any of the new features - a simple 'scrub' suffices for 90% of text you'll come across. But for anyone who spends a lot of time repurposing text from application to application manually, the extra ability to fine-tune text cleaners, and the option to drop 165 word documents onto a folder and let AppleScript get on with it, should prove a godsend.

Support for contextual menus will also mean that TextSoap will be increasingly available as a control-clicked pop-up menu within other applications without having to boot up TextSoap at all. Already, Microsoft's Outlook Express and Claris Emailer 2.0 support the feature and others are bound to follow as new versions are released.

There's very little left to say about TextSoap. It does what it says it does, and it does it brilliantly. The only slight downside is that the price of the software has been jacked up by 33% to a slightly-less-than-impulsive $20 (although the price of upgrading if you have registered the original is an eminently reasonable $5 - and it's voluntary). But click that Scrub button once and you'll be hooked for life and happily pay for the pleasure. Sheer unmitigated brilliance.