SmileOnMyMac Blog

We just released TextExpander 2.1 this week. It now supports one-character abbreviations. If you use a delimiter to trigger your expansions, you can turn any letter or character into an abbreviation for a snippet.

We also improved the performance and reliability for really fast typists. I say “really” fast, because I am a fast typist, and I never had a problem with TextExpander not keeping up with me. I just tested myself at 10 Fast Fingers, which I found via a b0rg_tech’s blog post, “Saving Seconds.”

Want to challenge me?
70 words

I’m in New York City this week, and decided to take a detour up to Connecticut to visit with Shawn and Lesa King, co-hosts of Your Mac Life, the Mac talk show of which SmileOnMyMac is a proud sponsor.

I had the fun of being a live in-studio guest on the show, talking about SmileOnMyMac, how we got started and my favorite products. I also got to experience the thrill of riding around the backroads of Connecticut on the back of Shawn’s motorcycle. We took a long tour from Danbury down to Westport. It was a beautiful day, not too cold. I borrowed riding gear from Lesa, in which I felt ready for a cameo on Battlestar Galactica.

The show is available as a streaming audio file at the Your Mac Life site until April 22nd. You can also subscribe to Your Mac Life at Audible.com, which makes it possible for you to download episodes to load onto your iPod.

I just came across this neat tip on developer David Smalley’s blog. It uses AppleScript to generate a tinyURL with a TextExpander abbreviation.

(If you’re not familiar with Tiny URL, it’s an online service that converts long URLs into short ones more appropriate to share in email and microblogs.)

I am no AppleScript maven, but it sounded pretty cool. I’ve been using Tiny URL a lot lately since I started using Twitter. So I consulted Greg, whose works on TextExpander development, to see what he thought. His response:

This does work, and it’s quite convenient. Here’s an easy way for you to import this:

And he sent me the AppleScript wrapped in a TextExpander Group. You can download it here:
http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/tinyurl.textexpander.zip

Download and unzip it, and then add the group in the TextExpander preferences pane.

Then you’re set to follow Greg’s instructions:

You select a URL, copy it to the Clipboard, then type “tinyurl” (and your delimiter if you’re not doing instant expansion) then wait a few seconds and “tinyurl” will be replaced by a tiny URL.

If you’re a real geek, you can grab the AppleScript from the original blog post and create your own AppleScript snippet in TextExpander.

I just got back Miami this week on a combination work/personal visit. I was born and raised here, and I never pass up a chance to come down to Florida during February.

I gave a presentation to the Gold Coast Mac Users Group, showing off PDFpen and DiscLabel primarily. Several members of the audience chimed in to share their happy SmileOnMyMac customer stories. What a fine and intelligent group!

I also gave a demo at the Apple Store at The Falls in South Miami. The demo coincided with the enormous power black-out that we had in Florida last week. The demo was postponed for the 45 minutes the power was out.

Apple Store customers are sure dedicated. Lots of people waited outside the store waiting for it to reopen. It was crowded almost before the computers had booted back up!

I just got a short tip from Austin in Carlow, Ireland:

I have all my abbreviations ending with “z” so that there is little chance of them getting confused with a word I don’t want substituted. It makes them easier to remember, and not many words (quiz is the only one that springs to mind) end in z.

This is the first tip where someone has suggested using the last character in an abbreviation to differentiate it from actual words.

When we first started posting TextExpander tips, we got a fairly extensive one from TJ on organizing abbreviations by context. That tip inspired me to use the forward slash (/) as the first character in all my abbreviations for URLs, i.e. /somm = http://www.smileonmymac.com, /gm = http://maps.google.com. [1]

I’ve started using “x” as a leading character for a lot of miscellaneous snippets, on the theory that not many words begin with “x”. I’d have to rewire my brain to think like Austin, using the last character as the differentiator.

What about you? Share your TextExpander abbreviation strategies in the comments.

[1] You might wonder how I can type my abbreviations without expanding them. The trick is to move the cursor using the arrow keys backward and forward once before you get to the end of the abbreviation. I learned this in a tip from Greg.

The response to the DiscLabel video tutorial was very positive, so we decided to do one for PDFpen.

We called on screencast producer extraordinaire Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline to work his magic again, and you can view the resulting PDFpen tutorial videos on our site.

One of the nice benefits of having a third party produce a tutorial is that we get a fresh look at our software and how it works. When Don released the DiscLabel videos, I got a whole new sense of how powerful its image editing and visual effects capabilities are. And I learned a couple of new tricks from the PDFpen series. For example, you can use the Special Characters palette (Edit > Special Characters) to insert checkmarks into checkboxes on forms that don’t have interactive checkboxes and fields. It looks much nicer than just inserting an “x”, which is what I used to do.

ScreenCastsOnline is a great resource for useful information about all sorts of Mac software. Don does regular shows on many interesting topics. I recommend it to anyone who likes learning new ways of better using your Mac.

We had a great week at Macworld San Francisco 2008. One of the big highlights: PDFpenPro was selected for The Mac Observer’s Editor’s Choice Award, along with 11 other great Mac products.

As the editors wrote in the award announcement, PDFpenPro “empowers users with the tools they need to edit their PDFs, create PDF forms, add signatures and graphics, and more — all without breaking the bank or throwing a steep learning curve at you.”

It was busy all week at our booth; lots of folks stopped by to learn more about PDFpen and PDFpenPro (which has all the features of PDFpen plus the ability to create cross-platform fillable forms). We also spoke with many current users of PDFpen and our other software. It’s always great to meet happy customers!

Despite the craziness that is Macworld Expo Week, I had a chance to sit down on Wednesday with Megan Morrone and Leo Laporte on their podcast, Jumping Monkeys. The general theme of the podcast is “parenting in the digital age.”

I recently launched a personal blog called The Favorite Aunt that focuses on tips for aunts and uncles, and they thought it would be interesting to talk about kids and technology from the aunt perspective. I’m also a co-founder with my sisters of the preschool reading magazine, The Tessy & Tab Reading Club, which Megan’s kids are subscribed to.

I talked about how you can use DiscLabel to make fantastic packaging for your nieces’ and nephews’ favorite music, and how the iPhone is the ultimate aunt tool.

You can check it out on iTunes or at the TWiT website.

Shishir from India has an interesting way of using TextExpander:

Thanks for developing this great product. Being new to the Mac, I have been trying out a lot of programs, and just happened to run into TextExpander.

At first I started using as most people would - to produce recurring snippets while typing. But now I use it as a system where I can keep tidbits of information I need to memorize and recall them quickly. When I am studying, if I come across a definition I need to memorize, I just select the text and create a shortcut for it with the prefix ll (learn). This way when I am reading and come across a term I dont remember, I quickly type the shortcut in my scratch pad and am able to see the definition. This has really helped me memorize a lot of stuff.

This is a good opportunity to point out the new Hotkey preference in TextExpander 2 for creating snippets on the fly. You can designate the key combination you want to use for creating snippets from a selection or from the Clipboard in the TextExpander pane in System Preferences, under the “Preferences” tab.

Once you set the hotkey, all you have to do is select the content you want to make into a snippet and press the hotkey combination. The TextExpander pane will open and the selected contents will be pasted into the snippet content field. Assign an abbreviation and you’re done.

If you want to know more about the powerful design and printing capabilities of DiscLabel, check out the series of video tutorials we just posted on our website.

Produced by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline, this series covers new design creation, iTunes and iPhoto integration, design editing, using special effects and clip art, among other topics. It’s a fantastic introduction to DiscLabel, but even experienced DiscLabel users may learn something they didn’t know.

I also highly recommend checking out ScreenCastsOnline. It’s a terrifically informative series of Mac-related tutorials. There are free tutorials that you can subscribe to via iTunes. There is also a ScreenCastsOnline Extra! membership that entitles you to view the entire library of screencasts as well as special members-only content.

I have been an Extra! member for several months. Don’s tutorials have gotten me through lots of tricky stuff on the Mac, including upgrading to Leopard. He really does have a gift for knowing how much detail to provide–enough so that you do learn how to do something, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed.