by Günther Blaschek
It all started back in 1987, when I tried to find a few special characters in the Symbol font. Apple's Key Caps utility was not very helpful, so I decided to write a simple utility that allowed me to select characters in a more convenient way. The result was a desk accessory called "Character Map". It displayed all symbols in a given font and let me copy and paste them into a text document.
Character Map was simple and intuitive to use, but I felt that it could be improved. It should directly insert the selected characters in the current document and it should be available permanently. The solution was to turn it into a system extension (called an "INIT" in those days). The first version was a quick hack, put together in an afternoon. When I clicked in a corner of the screen, the CHARacters POPped up, so I called the thing "PopChar". It worked remarkably well, so I decided to share it with other Mac users and made it available as freeware.
The responses from the Mac community were overwhelming. Many users liked the idea and suggested further improvements. Over the following years, PopChar was turned into a control panel and made more flexible. During that time, some applications and extensions (notably MS Word and Adobe Type Reunion) caused nasty problems. It sometimes took weeks to find a suitable workaround, and the problems got worse with each new release of these products.
In 1995, I found myself spending much of my spare time with fixes and improvements of PopChar, so I felt it was time to earn some money for these efforts. I redeveloped PopChar from scratch. Eight years of experience helped me to avoid the previous problems and to add new features that I (and other users) found useful. It took more than a year to finish the new product, PopChar Pro. Since the release of version 1.0 in late 1996, PopChar Pro continuously evolved, driven by user feedback.
PopChar is now distributed by ergonis software. Feel free to download the PopChar Installer for a test drive.
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