SmileOnMyMac Blog

The ship has sailed.

After two days in Milan, I met up with the Geek Cruise in Savona. I ran into Shawn King. (If you know Shawn, you know it’s hard to miss Shawn in a crowd.) Shawn’s wife and co-host, Lesa Snider King, was working furiously on her forthcoming book, Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual while we waited to board. And waited. And waited. Imagine being at the gate for a plane that holds 2600 passengers. And multiply that by 3, because everything seems to be three times as complicated on a cruise.

The first morning, Don McAllister did a great presentation called “Mastering Your Inbox.” I had to laugh at this dictum of his:

“Don’t live in your inbox.”

I know that I usually do, but being on this cruise will probably help cure this unhealthy obsession. We have internet access, but it is slow and not 100% reliable. I can’t live in my inbox now. (And no, it has nothing to do with being distracted by all the fun non-geek cruise activities…)

Don talked about using TextExpander for speeding up the process of replying to emails and processing your inbox. He also showed off an interesting program called MailTemplate from MailTank, which lets you build very useful templates. I am going to definitely check it out, when I have the bandwidth to download anything.

Lesa took a break from editing her manuscript to give a workshop on Digital Photo Workflow: How to Shoot and Edit Like A Pro. She’s great at pointing out simple things you can do to take better photos and at making the behemoth known as Photoshop into useful pointers for the amateur user. I love her tips on using grayscale and sepia filters to make otherwise blah photos into something really interesting.

(I need to give a plug for Lesa’s book here. She is working so hard on this. It wasn’t part of her plan to be editing during the cruise, but book publisher schedules wait for no one. If you want to know everything worth knowing about Photoshop, be sure to pre-order a copy NOW and support the hardest-working person on the Geek Cruise.)

The highlight of my day, aside from finding the perfect pizza in Naples, was David Pogue’s iPhone presentation. I am an unabashed Pogue Fan Girl. He’s been one of my favorite writers since I read Mac OS 9 for Dummies years ago. His columns and videos for the New York Times are not to be missed, especially when he draws on his background as a Broadway composer to spoof technology.

Great speakers, like great performers, know how to improvise. David thought he’d discovered a device that would project his iPhone to the screen, but it only worked for video. He then tried to use the iSight camera to get the image up, but the iSight flips the video to be a mirror-image. He finally hit on the solution of using iMovie in iSight capture mode. iMovie does not flip the video. All David had to do was face his MacBook Air away from himself and hold the iPhone in front of the iSight, facing him. Check out the photo below.

It was a great presentation. David is so enthusiastic about the iPhone on so many levels, it’s contagious. He showed off lots of iPhone Apps. Must have: “Fake Phone Call.” With it, your iPhone can simulate a phone call coming in. Great for those meetings or dates where you need an excuse to get away. It’s also apparently great for pranksters: David’s son even faked him out to think that Steve Jobs was on the line.

The boat is just pulling into Messina, Sicily as I am typing this, so I’ll close here for today. (If it’s any consolation to those envying us on this cruise, just know that it has been pouring rain with lots of lightning all night and it looks like a lousy day to get off the boat.) Tomorrow we’ll be at sea all day en route to Alexandria, Egypt, so I hope to have lots more to share from all the great presentations that are scheduled for that day.

Me, outside the Nike Store in Naples. A little piece of Oregon away from home…

Let’s say it’s your job to remind people to do something. Maybe you are the accounts receivable person, and you regularly need to remind people to pay you in 15 days. If you use TextExpander, your days of looking at the calendar and calculating that date are over!

We added date and time math capability to TextExpander 2.5. Now you can create a snippet that automatically inserts a date that is 15 days from today. Here’s how:

1) Create a new snippet by clicking on the plus (+) sign under your list of snippets on the left in the TextExpander Preference pane.

2) Click on the plus (+) sign under the snippet content pane on the right. Choose Date/Time Math > Add Day(s).

3) TextExpander inserts %@+1D into your snippet content pane. Change “1D” to “15D”.

4) Insert the date format you wish to appear, again using the plus (+) sign menu on the right. For example, if you want the date to appear in formatted “October 29, 2008″, insert the following:
 - Choose Date > Month > January. Add a space.
 - Choose Date > Day > 1. Add a comma and space.
 - Choose Date > Year > 2001  

5) When you are done, the snippet content should be: 
%@+15D%B %e, %Y

6) Give your snippet an abbreviation, such as “d15″ or “payupnow”.

TextExpander 2.5 is a free upgrade to registered users of TextExpander 1.x and earlier. You can download it here. Besides the date/time math, we’ve also added some new built-in snippet groups: Internet Productivity (which includes the AppleScripts we’ve posted here for URL shortening) and Symbols (for those who need to use symbols like copyright, trademark, euro, yen, infinity, etc.).

I’ve been playing with some new AppleScripts in TextExpander, courtesy of Bakari Chevanu at AppleMatters. He wrote an extensive post on how you can use TextExpander to launch applications and control them.

The snippets are really simple and they really work. With a short TextExpander abbreviation, you can open or quit a program, navigate to a website, close all Finder windows, and more. While operations like Open or Quit have a built-in shortcut, the program has to be active before you can use the shortcut. These AppleScripts activate the programs for you.

Best of all, you don’t have to be a true geek to use these. Bakari recommends testing the AppleScripts in Script Editor first, before pasting them into a TextExpander snippet, but this is very easy to do.

1) Open Script Editor (it’s in the AppleScript folder in Applications).
2) Paste one of Bakari’s scripts into the editor.
3) Click “Run.”

If the script did what you wanted it to do, you’re good to go. Paste it into a new TextExpander snippet (be sure to change the format to AppleScript), assign a short abbreviation, and try it out.

My favorite is this one for opening up Twitter in Safari without having to be in Safari or use a bookmark:

tell application "Safari"

	activate

	open location "http://www.twitter.com/"

end tell

I set the abbreviation to ‘tw (I’m using the apostrophe as a leading character in all my AppleScript snippets, and that seems to be working nicely).

If you have any creative ideas for using AppleScript to control programs with TextExpander, share them in the comments.

Five years ago this month, SmileOnMyMac released its first product, DiscLabel, at the Macworld Creative Pro Expo in New York. It won a Best of Show Award; the rest, as they say, is history.

To celebrate, we are giving away some free licenses via the excellent podcasts that we are proud to sponsor: Your Mac Life, Mac Geek Gab, MacCast and the Apple Weekly Report.

(Update: we are also offering a birthday special discount. Listen to one of our sponsored podcasts for details!)

Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab decided to have a poetry contest to give away the licenses, and so far, the winners are great! Here’s a few:

From Randy Chevrier:

Five candles blown out.
Smile has made life so easy.
They’re great beyond doubt.

So much text to type!
Eureka! TextExpander.
Fingers are at peace.

From Mark Newton:

Geek Gab costs me naught.
Two nerds offer food for thought.
Then warn “Don’t get caught.”

(Yes, there was a preference for haiku!)

From Paul DeCarli:

There were two Mac geeks whom I thought
Give the best advice that I’ve got.
The fanboy or switcher,
Poorer or richer,
We Geek Gab fans sure don’t get caught.

(If you are wondering about the references to not getting caught, you should listen to Dave — and the awesome John Braun, his co-host — on Mac Geek Gab.)

Got your own poem? Post it in the comments!

Here’s a fun photo of Philip and me from WWDC:

The week started off with a bang at the sfMacIndie fête at Jillians, which we co-sponsored this year rather than throw our own party.

This year’s conference was excellent — the presentations were of high quality, and the iPhone sessions were great. I hope next year is just as good.

I got to meet Peter Maurer of Many Tricks software in person. We acquired Textpander from him in 2006. We decided that he’s the grandfather of TextExpander, that SmileOnMyMac are the parents, and that TextExpander is the unruly child. I think that fits.

Here are some of our other developer friends we encountered this year. Definitely check out their software:
Red Sweater Software / MarsEdit
Boinx
Agile Web Solutions / 1Password
MacSpeech / Dictate

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.

Quite a number of our fellow Mac software developers have teamed up to bring a little joy to Mac users this holiday season, in the form of the MacSanta 20% discount!

Every day, until December 24, five different developers’ wares are featured at 20% off for one day only. SmileOnMyMac is featured today! Besides the daily 20% off specials, you’ll find extended savings of 10% off during the rest of the MacSanta festivities. (One of our “smileworthy” picks, SpamSieve is among them!)

Thanks to Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba for organizing this great gift for fans of Mac software.

SmileOnMyMac’s products can help with the holidays. Use DiscLabel to make CDs, DVDs, and packaging for holiday gifts. Use PDFpen to handle last-minute corrections to your family’s annual letter. Use TextExpander to save time typing your thank you notes. Use PageSender to fax your Christmas list to Santa. Use BrowseBack to provide a visual history of your Web search for the perfect present. Use PhotoPrinto to create stunning photo albums on your ink jet printer.

I finally got around to implementing one of the most fun new features in TextExpander 2: the ability to set a sound preference per snippet group. I always thought it would be great to have a different alert sound for autocorrection expansions.

Before the new version, when I was happily typing along and heard the default TextExpander sound (the classic TE “pop”), I would worry that I had typed one of my shortcuts by accident. I’d stop, look, and realize that once again, I had misspelled “accomodate”.

Now I’ve set up the Autocorrect Snippet Group with a different sound: “oops!” It was so easy:

1) I downloaded the sound at The Freesound Project, a huge collection of user-contributed sound files, made available under a Creative Commons License. (If you want the “oops”, it’s here.) Registration is free and is required for downloading.

2) I dragged the sound file “9020_WIM_oops.wav” into my home directory’s Library>Sounds folder.

3) In TextExpander preferences, I selected the Autocorrect group and clicked on the Sound drop-down menu. The “oops” was now one of the choices. (If the System Preference pane is already open to TextExpander, you might need to close it and reopen it.)

I think the possibilities are interesting and endless. If you’ve got a sound that would make a great TextExpander alert, let us know in the comments. Even better: upload it to the Freesound Project and give us the link!