SmileOnMyMac Blog

Until recently, the only reliable way to synchronize data between two Macs was to use Apple’s MobileMe service. TextExpander has support for MobileMe so you can sync your snippets between all of your Macs.

With the rise in popularity of “cloud computing,” third-party syncing services such as Dropbox have come on the scene, and with a bit of work, you can sync your snippets using it as a MobileMe alternative.

Dropbox is a free online storage service that synchronizes the data of a folder in your home directory with any other Mac you have the service installed on. When you make a change to a file or add something new to your Dropbox, their agent application will automatically push the changes to the cloud in the background and notify your other Macs of the change so they pull the update.

This works great for TextExpander because each time you create or modify a snippet, it saves the Settings.textexpander file that contains your settings and snippets. If we store this file in Dropbox, it will automatically update on each of your Macs. Dropbox can even deal with your Mac being offline temporarily.

This isn’t for the faint of heart. You will need a bit of Terminal-fu to make sure that things run seamlessly. If you’re comfortable with the requirement, here’s how to sync TextExpander using Dropbox.

TextExpander 2.5.1 is required for proper synchronization with Dropbox. It’s a free update:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/download.html

On your primary machine:

1. Install Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/)
2. Close System Preferences
3. In the Finder, go to your Dropbox folder and create a folder called “Library.”
4. Drag the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder to your Dropbox/Library folder. Your TextExpander settings and snippets are now stored on Dropbox.
5. Open Terminal.app and type the following command:

   ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander

The symlink will then redirect TextExpander to your Dropbox folder to grab the snippet information. Take note that you won’t get any sort of confirmation in the Terminal that this operation succeeded. You can confirm it by going to [Home]/Library/Application Support and checking to see if the TextExpander folder is an alias now.

On your subsequent Macs:

1. Install Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/)
2. Close System Preferences
3. Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder. Since the snippets are on Dropbox, we need to symlink it like we did on the primary machine.
4. Open Terminal.app and type the following command:

   ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander

As with before, you won’t get confirmation in Terminal but can be sure by checking that [Home]/Library/Application Support/TextExpander is an aliased folder.

This technique should work with almost any Mac application you use. It can be used with Things and Delicious Library since they don’t have native syncing support built in.

A few interesting tips were published on Macworld.com today, in a piece titled “Creative text expanding“. Derik DeLong shared some ways he uses TextExpander to easily insert HTML tags using the clipboard. He also gives a few examples of using shell script snippets in the Terminal to execute Unix commands.

I am certainly the least geeky person here at SmileOnMyMac HQ, so I was pleased to discover that even I could figure out how to use the Terminal and TextExpander to run a word count on text copied to the clipboard. Not hard at all. Don’t forget to change your snippet type to “Shell Script” when you’ve pasted the snippet into your TextExpander library.

Carlo Beenakker has developed a TextExpander snippet group with Latex math and Greek symbols which he uses when discussing math and physics in email or chat. Some examples from this group:

You can download the Latex math and Greek symbols group here:

http://ilorentz.org/beenakker/Latexsymbols.textexpander

Choose Add Group from File… from the + menu to import the new group.

Thanks for sharing your group with us, Carlo!

We’ve just added support to TextExpander 2.6 to specify on a per-group basis when abbreviations will expand. The choices are to expand after:

• Whitespace (the default / classic behavior)
• All characters except letters & numbers (punctuation, etc.)
• Any character

TextExpander user Miguel Brunell from Mexico helped develop an excellent use of the new “any character” option with snippets for Spanish accents. For example, one can type ~n for ñ or ‘i for í. If you type in Spanish, you may find this handy. For example, cigüeña is the word for “stork” in Spanish. Using TextExpander, you can type c-i-g-”-u-e-~-n-a and get: cigüeña!

You can download Miguel’s snippets here: Spanish Accents

Choose Add Group from File… from the + menu in TextExpander to add the downloaded snippet group. Divertanse!

Everything you always wanted to know about SmileOnMyMac … Chuck Joiner is not afraid to ask!

Philip, Greg and I were guests on MacVoices. We talked about how the company got started, how our products have evolved, and where we might be going in the future. Greg let it be known that we are unlikely to move into the first-person shooter genre. (Apparently John Braun of the Mac Observer was disappointed…)

So if you’ve been wondering about where we got our unique company name, check it out.

Rick Yaeger of MacMerc.TV has just released a great introduction to TextExpander.

Rick covers basic text snippets, autocorrection, URL shortening and more in just five minutes. It’s very entertaining, too! I highly recommend you have a look.

If you have more than five minutes, we also have the TextExpander screencast, produced by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline.

If you do FileMaker development, Camp Software has released a TextExpander snippet group that will save you LOTS of time and keystrokes.

FMSnippets has over 250 snippets for FileMaker 9 and 10, including practically all functions used in the FileMaker calculation engine. Check out the examples at Camp Software’s website.

The price of the snippet group is $9. According to Camp Software, one of their developers saved 95,962 keypresses in two months using these snippets. If we use TextExpander’s standard calculation of 400 characters per minute, that’s nearly 4 hours. At $2.25 per hour saved, FMSnippets is a real bargain!

I suppose I’m completely starstruck by now. Tonight I met Sinbad, who is an enthusiastic and very knowledgeable TextExpander user! So cool. He was at the Your Mac Life Rocks Expo party tonight. No picture, unfortunately.

But I did get copies of the great photos of Greg and Philip with David Pogue and have posted them to our Macworld 2009 Flickr set. David Pogue is also a TextExpander user, and he came by the booth to ask the guys a few questions.

We had another great day at Macworld 2009. I’ve added a couple more photos to the Flickr set that I took. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a lot more soon — our friend and booth team member Sean Newman, who is also a photographer, has been taking lots of photos at the booth.

Highlight of the day: David Pogue came to visit us!! Photos and more details to come.

We are here at Macworld San Francisco 2009. We are at booth 407: come by and say “hi”. It was a busy day, but I did manage to post a few photos on Flickr.

A couple exciting things to report: PDFpen is featured on the Modbook tablet Mac at the Axiotron booth. One of the team is at the Axiotron booth all day showing folks how cool it could be to edit PDFs on a tablet. Today, Axiotron unveiled their newest model, and their most famous member of their board of advisors, Steve Wozniak, demonstrated how to use it. At one point, Philip turned to me and said: “Look! He’s using PDFpen now.” How exciting to see our software being used by the co-founder of Apple Computers.

Later in the day we were visited by not one, not two, but three Mac celebrities. Tonya and Adam Engst of TidBITs and Take Control Books came by the booth to chat with Greg and me. And while they were there, Guy Kawasaki stopped to say hi, and ended up talking with us about TextExpander. He’s a fan.

Great day. More tomorrow. I need to get to sleep!

Philip demos PDFpen on the Modbook

Woz demos PDFpen on the Modbook!

Greg, Tonya Engst, Jean, Guy Kawasaki, Adam Engst