“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!

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

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 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

I had the fun of being a live in-studio guest on the show, talking about SmileOnMyMac, how we got started and my favorite products. I also got to experience the thrill of riding around the backroads of Connecticut on the back of Shawn’s motorcycle. We took a long tour from Danbury down to Westport. It was a beautiful day, not too cold. I borrowed riding gear from Lesa, in which I felt ready for a cameo on Battlestar Galactica.

The show is available as a streaming audio file at the Your Mac Life site until April 22nd. You can also subscribe to Your Mac Life at Audible.com, which makes it possible for you to download episodes to load onto your iPod.

(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.

I gave a presentation to the Gold Coast Mac Users Group, showing off PDFpen and DiscLabel primarily. Several members of the audience chimed in to share their happy SmileOnMyMac customer stories. What a fine and intelligent group!

I also gave a demo at the Apple Store at The Falls in South Miami. The demo coincided with the enormous power black-out that we had in Florida last week. The demo was postponed for the 45 minutes the power was out.

Apple Store customers are sure dedicated. Lots of people waited outside the store waiting for it to reopen. It was crowded almost before the computers had booted back up!

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.

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.

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!