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…

In the wake of our release of TextExpander 2.5, David Chartier, Assistant Editor at Ars Technica, requested support for snipr.com. I was surprised to find that Snipr, Snurl, and Snipurl are all the same service. They will require registration as of December 31, 2008. Given that, I wrote a snippet which supports using these services as a registered user.

Here’s what to do to install the new snippet:

1. Download Snipr.textexpander.zip
2. If Safari doesn’t automatically unzip it, then double-click to unzip it
3. Launch System Preferences and select TextExpander
4. Under the + menu, select Add Group from File…
5. Check the box labeled Import as editable local copy:
    
6. Locate the Snipr.textexpander file and press Open
7. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the new Snipr group
8. Select the /snipr snippet
9. Change mySnipUserID and mySnipAPI at the top to your own values (you can find the API value in your Snipr preferences)

Here’s how to use the new snippet:

1. Copy a URL
2. Click where you’d like the shortened URL to appear
3. Type /snipr
4. Voilà! The shortened URL will appear.

Happy Snipr-ing (or is it Snurl-ing or Snipurl-ing?)…

Enjoy!

I know I do…

(and I’ve probably reset this a few times when testing)

How about you?

How much time have you saved with TextExpander?

TextExpander 2.4.1 is now available. In the course of fixing the memory leak for 2.4, I made a mistake on the code for handling the case of abbreviations. Once again “tiat” and “Tiat” can expand to “This is a test.” Yay! To all those affected, sorry for the trouble, and happy typing!

TextExpander user Mar shared a collection of AppleScript snippets he found very useful while helping a friend with a tedious recordkeeping task that required a lot of dates.

Say you need the date for next Monday; type “`nmo” (or “‘nmo” depending on the date format), and TextExpander gives you the date, 08/18/2008.

Tomorrow is `d1, a week ago is `d-7, etc. There’s 31 formulations in the group. You can download the .zip files here:
International date format
U.S. date format
Unzip the file and then choose “Add Group From File…” in the plus (+) menu under your list of snippets.

You could also link directly to the groups on our server. Choose “Add Group from URL…” and enter one of these URLs:
International: http://www.smileonmymac.com/te/Dates.textexpander
U.S.: http://www.smileonmymac.com/te/DatesUS.textexpander

Thanks to Mar for sharing these. As he notes, they are modifiable, so if you have your own special date needs–and are not afraid of a little code– download the file and customize it!

Or better yet, create a new and exciting snippet group and share it with the rest of us. (Send them to me at jean@smileonmymac.com.)

We’ve already noted an easy way to get TinyURLs via TextExpander’s AppleScript snippet capabilities.

bit.ly is another URL shortening service that has some very interesting features, like history, thumbnails and click-through stats. Jonathan Berger posted an article at LIVEdigitally on creating a TextExpander AppleScript snippet to quickly generate bit.ly shortcuts.

It works. Here’s the link to his article, bit.lyfied: http://bit.ly/2Oroik

It all got started when I was typing the word “fête”.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if I didn’t have to go searching in the Special Characters palette for the e+circumflex every time I wanted to type “fête” or “crêpe”?” So I started adding these accented words to my TextExpander snippets. The abbreviation was the word without the accent mark, and when I typed it, it would be replaced with the accented version.

Once I had created a few of these, I thought it would make a handy snippet group for some folks. I came up with a short list of words, and then I discovered this Wikipedia article: List of English Words with Diacritics. I picked the words that seemed most useful to me and created a snippet group.

List of the Accented Words Snippet Group (PDF)

If you download TextExpander 2.3, you can easily add this Accented Words group by clicking on the plus sign (+) under your snippet list in the TextExpander Preference Pane, and choosing “Add Predefined Snippet Group.”

The great thing about snippet groups that are hosted online is that you can make additions. If you have any suggestions for accented words to be added, email them to me. If you have ideas for other useful snippet groups, or have created one yourself that you want to share, just let me know.

Olé!

We just released TextExpander 2.2. We added a new snippet group of CSS definitions (created by me!) that you can use. To do so, click on the plus sign (+) below the snippet list and choose “Add Predefined Group”. “CSS Snippets” has been added to the list.

It’s always an fun intellectual exercise for me to develop a new snippet group for public use. Trying to anticipate how people will use the snippets is a challenge. I think it’s important for the abbreviations in a group to have a common leading character so that they are easier to remember. The HTML snippets all use the comma. The logic there is that Shift + comma produces a left angle bracket, the leading character in HTML tags. For CSS, I used the semi-colon. It’s easy to reach on the keyboard, and a semi-colon is used a separator for CSS property definitions. And, as is important with all TextExpander abbreviations, no actual words begin with a semi-colon.

Here’s a PDF with the CSS abbreviations and snippets. (You did know that you can print your snippets and abbreviations as a handy list, right? Command + P to print a group, Option + Command + P to print all groups.)

A few notes on these snippets:

• All the abbreviations begin with a semi-colon
• There are abbreviations for basic HTML selectors, like ;body, ;h1, ;ul, ;em, which expand into CSS for the corresponding tag, and reposition your cursor in the middle
• There are the commonly-used properties, like ;color, ;lheight, ;fsize, and ;border
• There are also some “packaged” snippets, like ;sans, ;serif, ;fs10, (font-size: 10px;), ;lh16 (line-height: 16px;)

Anyway, give it a whirl and let me know what you think! Any suggestions for additions would be very welcome.

We just released TextExpander 2.1 this week. It now supports one-character abbreviations. If you use a delimiter to trigger your expansions, you can turn any letter or character into an abbreviation for a snippet.

We also improved the performance and reliability for really fast typists. I say “really” fast, because I am a fast typist, and I never had a problem with TextExpander not keeping up with me. I just tested myself at 10 Fast Fingers, which I found via a b0rg_tech’s blog post, “Saving Seconds.”

Want to challenge me?
70 words

[ Update (10/22/08): We've had many reports the original AppleScript by David Smalley has stopped working. The improved AppleScript by JD Strong continues to work. Even David Smalley posted that he is using JD Strong's AppleScript now.

Also, if you want to see the step-by-step instructions for adding this AppleScript to TextExpander, Jeff Gamet just posted a great tip at The Mac Observer. ]

I just came across this neat tip on developer David Smalley’s blog. It uses AppleScript to generate a tinyURL with a TextExpander abbreviation.

(If you’re not familiar with Tiny URL, it’s an online service that converts long URLs into short ones more appropriate to share in email and microblogs.)

I am no AppleScript maven, but it sounded pretty cool. I’ve been using Tiny URL a lot lately since I started using Twitter. So I consulted Greg, whose works on TextExpander development, to see what he thought. His response:

This does work, and it’s quite convenient. Here’s an easy way for you to import this:

And he sent me the AppleScript wrapped in a TextExpander Group. You can download it here:
http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/tinyurl.textexpander.zip

Download and unzip it, and then add the group in the TextExpander preferences pane.

Then you’re set to follow Greg’s instructions:

You select a URL, copy it to the Clipboard, then type “tinyurl” (and your delimiter if you’re not doing instant expansion) then wait a few seconds and “tinyurl” will be replaced by a tiny URL.

If you’re a real geek, you can grab the AppleScript from the original blog post and create your own AppleScript snippet in TextExpander.