The Holmes Office

A fantastic little app for saving time when developing or designing websites – or indeed anything that requires dummy text flowing in to complete a layout – Lipservice is a lorem ipsum generator for Windows.

It’s often useful to quickly insert some random text to fill a space, so you get a feel for how something looks or works. You could always randomly hit the keyboard in a “yuwggdsadf” kind of way but that looks a little messy. Or you could head to a site like www.lipsum.com and grab some text to copy and paste in. Typically:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

The problem with the latter is that you tend to get the same sentence repeating throughout your design, so you don’t get the variation of layout that you will eventually see from the final copy.

This is where Lipservice comes into its own. Once installed, press Ctrl+Alt+V and it will paste a random latin sentence into your document. Here’s a few for example:

Proin gravida dui qui enim variu eleifend. Integer accuman feli it amet odio loborti at adipicing metu rutrum. Pellenteque habitant morbi tritique enectu et netu et maleuada fame ac turpi egeta. Sed commodo tellu ut mi tritique pharetra.

This is quicker than going to another website to copy & paste, and looks better in a document than:

asdfsadfj;l jsdkl;j asdoifaspuqweru klsjdfj lweupo dsfj ;weoruasdflk; sad;fsdjl.

As I have just discovered, as well as being messy, this takes longer than a couple of Ctrl+Alt+V’s.

So it saves time and produces better layouts. That’s what I call a win-win!

Lipservice was created by the guys at The Simpler Solution, is free, and is available from www.lipserviceapp.com.