Switched to Apple / Mac

TextExpander 2.0 – Expantastic!

October 17th, 2007

Yesterday morning I discovered an update to one of the invaluable tools I use on a daily basis. (TextExpander

) In a nutshell, TextExpander allows you to save snippets that can be expanded when a series of characters are typed. For example, I could save a snippet with the text www.switchedtomac.com and give it a shortcut of s2m. Now anytime I type s2m it gets expanded to www.switchedtomac.com. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how this would be valuable to someone who spends their day working on support e-mail, writing, or any other typing intensive tasks. Not only can you expand text with TextExpander, but images as well. I could drag and drop a picture of myself into the snippet window and assign a sequence such as mypic to it and now I can paste the image where I want just my typing mypic. You can read about more TextExpander features here. I’ve been using it for a fairly long time now and it is great.

With yesterday’s 2.0 release, Smile on My Mac opened the door to additional functionality to TextExpander with the addition of snippet groups. While the simple addition of groups doesn’t seem that big, it actually make TextExpander a full fledged clip manager now. Previous to the 2.0 release I still used a separate clipboard utility to keep a database of URLs to paste. Specifically, these were tinyurls with a long description and it would have been difficult to keep up with them by assigning an abbreviation to each of them.  When looking for a clip manager I started with what I already owned which was iClip but it just didn’t fit my workflow and was a little unstable for me. I then tried a bunch of others including PTHPasteboard, CopyPaste, Savvy Clipboard, and others before finding the relatively abandoned iSnip. This fit the bill nicely without all the cute junk attached. However, this means that I essentially had two repositories for this sort of information and one of them was text only. So yesterday morning I migrated over the iSnip clips to 3 separate groups in TextExpander and abandoned iSnip. It was like getting a free app on an upgrade!

if you spend any significant amount of time on a keyboard, check out TextExpander.

Entry Filed under: Macintosh