SmileOnMyMac Blog

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!

Victor Cajiao interviews me for the Typical Mac User Podcast, episode 108. We chat about the company and our products. Victor is a big fan of BrowseBack (he calls it “Time Machine for Web Browsing”) and says that TextExpander has changed his life.

Victor’s running a contest for copies of DiscLabel, TextExpander and PDFpen, so give the podcast a listen to find out how you can win.

We released three updates tonight: TextExpander 2.0.3, BrowseBack 1.4.1, and PhotoPrinto 2.1.1. These updates add Leopard compatibility, and are free for registered users.

We had already updated our other products for Leopard: PDFpen 3.3, DiscLabel 4.4.1, and PageSender 4.1.

As always, if you have any problems, just get in touch with our friendly (and prompt!) support team.

Earlier this month, I went to New York to give a demo of our products at two Mac user groups, MetroMac in the city and LIMac on Long Island.

It was a great chance to meet current customers and hopefully win over new ones. (And I got to pretend to be Britney Spears with the headset microphone.)

With Chris Bastian, MetroMac president, at the Apple Store in Soho

LIMac demo: “Better Living Through Software”

With George Canellis, LIMac board member and Your Mac Life fan.

Philip Goward is interviewed on Pomcast.com, a European podcast, available in French, German, Spanish and English. (This interview is in English.) Philip talks about the new TextExpander 2.0, the newly-announced SDK for third-party developers on the iPhone, and more.

You can download the podcast from Pomcast.com, or listen to it in iTunes via this link.

Amusez-vous bien!