SmileOnMyMac Blog

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.