SmileOnMyMac Blog

I have heard from a few friends and customers that “.c” is a terrible abbreviation for the © symbol. It tends to drive people crazy when they are trying to type “.com”. Originally, I didn’t think it was a problem, because TextExpander will only expand abbreviations at the beginning of a word. But it’s happened to me, too. It’s possible to do something that causes TextExpander to clear its key log, like using the arrow keys, and then it will be as if the .com is coming at the beginning of a word.

I was planning to issue an update next week, but here it is Saturday morning. I’m doing my usual Saturday morning thing: working out at the gym while listening to podcasts. I’m catching MacBreak Weekly with Leo Laporte & Co., when I hear the familiar little “pop” sound of TextExpander. “Cute,” I think, “They’re using TextExpander.” Then Leo says “I’m really mad.”

TextExpander shipped out HTML entity abbreviations and one of them is .co, and everytime I type .com now in my browser, it replaces it with the entity for copyright. It’s driving me crazy.

Ack! I practically fall of the stationary bike. I know what I’ll be doing when I get home, and it’s not jumping in the shower. (At least not right away.)

The revised HTML snippet file is now available. The abbreviation for © has been changed from “.c” to “.copy”. It’s not a huge savings in terms of keystrokes (one to be exact), but at least it won’t conflict with a commonly-typed combination of characters.

I also updated the combined snippet file, which has both HTML and Autocorrection snippets. Besides fixing the “.c” problem in this file, I also reversed the order so that the HTML snippets appear before the Autocorrect snippets, on the theory that you’re more likely to want to review HTML snippets you can use than spelling errors you may or may not make.

Look, despite my stint in Geekcorps, I’ve never claimed to be a geek. My apologies to Leo and everyone else who was plagued by the unwanted “pop”. It’s a pretty safe bet that Philip and Greg are not going to hand over any coding projects to me anytime soon.

OK, now it’s time for that shower.

That’s right, folks! You don’t have to shlep on the L.I.E. all the way to Manhattan to get your favorite PDF editing tool for the Mac. From our intrepid correspondent, George Canellis:

Newsflash! The retail box of PDFpen has been spotted in the Walt Whitman Apple Store in Huntington Station, New York! Here’s your product in the hands of yours truly, who just happens to be proudly wearing his official Your Mac Life hockey jersey which, as luck would have it, is sponsored by SmileOnMyMac. What a coincidence!!!

Congratulations on scoring some prime shelf real estate in our favorite retail store!!

Thanks, George! (George gets a free product from SmileOnMyMac, and you can too! Just send your Apple Store PDFpen photos to jean@smileonmymac.com. If we post your photo, you’ll get your choice of one of our great products.)

BTW, I’ll be coming to Long Island to speak to the Long Island Macintosh Users Group (LIMac) on October 12th.

(That’s like 50 in shareware years!)

PageSender was launched 5 years ago today. The “fax software that really works” was released by Smile Software (the “smile” in SmileOnMyMac) at a time before fax capability was built into Mac OS X. Though faxing was later added in OS X 10.3 (Panther), PageSender’s full feature set, stability and excellent customer service made it the favorite of reviewers and users. As Macworld put it, “one application is a shining light in a field dominated by dim products.”

What’s a birthday without a cake? And candles! And singing! (And exploitation of children for commercial purposes!)

(View the video at YouTube.)

Coming May 8th: PageSender 4 with some great new features, including spam fax filtering and PDF cover pages!

(Those who know me will recognize the sacrifice I made getting a photogenic white-frosted cake, rather than chocolate…)

David in New Mexico wrote to TextExpander Support:

When using TextExpander in Excel, TextExpander seems to keep the abbreviation that was typed in a cell and then enter the snippet four cells over from where the abbreviation was entered. Seems to work the came whether or not the “restore clipboard” option is selected. Is there another preference to help with this problem?

TextExpander Support (in this case, Greg) stumbled onto the answer:

Try triple-clicking the empty cell rather than single or double clicking and see if the snippet expands correctly.

David confirmed it does work, and even explained why:

You are correct, triple-clicking does work. I have had to use this technique for other things, and it didn’t dawn on me to use it here. Instead of inserting text into a cell (which is what happens if you just click on the cell), you are editing a cell (which is what triple-clicking does) and then entering the information. This now works like you would expect.

We just released a new external snippet file for TextExpander. This file features over 60 HTML tags and special characters that can be inserted using short abbreviations.

If you like to do your HTML code, this file could save you lots of time. Once you install it, you just have to type ,h1 and TextExpander will automatically insert <h1></h1>

The cursor will even be positioned in the right place!

It was an interesting challenge to put these snippets together. The AutoCorrect snippet file was easier to do. All the “abbreviations” are common misspellings. For the HTML tags, it was necessary to come up with an abbreviation system that would be memorable and useful.

We decided to use the comma as the leading character for all the HTML tag abbreviations. Why? Because it’s the same key as the left angle bracket (<)! Another subjective factor is which tags to include and exclude. We didn't want to file to be huge, so you might find your favorite HTML tag is not on the list.

So this is a work-in-progress. All feedback is welcome!

Thanks to everyone who helped me pull this together, especially TJ, Edward, and Frank!