Archive for July, 2007

TextExpander: The Sound of Productivity

Monday, July 16th, 2007

… can be hazardous to your relationship. That’s what TJ, a regular contributor of TextExpander tips, found out. From his blog, in which the TJ household has finally upgraded from dial-up internet:

So I’m sitting on the bed with my laptop, and Tracey is working on the Desktop. We’ve been here for several hours — in fact I don’t remember the last time Tracey was up this late.

A few minutes ago she turned around and said “What’s that noise?”

We then had the to-be-expected conversation of me asking What Noise? followed by her trying to imitate the sound and then me mocking her. She claimed the sound was coming from my computer. I told her it was all in her head.

I thought it was over until a few minutes later she said, “Right there! That noise! What was that?!?!”

“Oh” I thought, realizing exactly what it was (and that her impression of it wasn’t all that bad, I just no longer “heard” it because I was used to it…

It’s the sound TextExpander plays by default when you use a shortcut.

TJ suggests one might want to disable that sound in TextExpander Preferences in the interests of domestic tranquility.

Maybe she needs a copy of TextExpander of her very own — then she’ll come to associate that sound with the pleasure of having saved time and energy. :-)

PDFpen tip: Saving Red Ink

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Tom from West Virginia sent us this tip:

I’m a college English instructor, and I now use PDFpen to mark my essays. I’ve added some of the common English correction marks to the Scribbles palette of my Library and just drag them over to where they’re needed in the student’s essay.

I’ve found that by taking time to make my marks more legible, the Scribbles are much more readable than my own on paper copies. Too, the students now have permanent digital copies of all their written work which they can still print if they wish.

It’s easier for me and students are much happier, too. And think of all the red ink I’ve saved, not to mention paper! The other editing tools with PDFpen are also very useful.

Using PDFpen to grade college papers