SmileOnMyMac Blog

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.

Shishir from India has an interesting way of using TextExpander:

Thanks for developing this great product. Being new to the Mac, I have been trying out a lot of programs, and just happened to run into TextExpander.

At first I started using as most people would - to produce recurring snippets while typing. But now I use it as a system where I can keep tidbits of information I need to memorize and recall them quickly. When I am studying, if I come across a definition I need to memorize, I just select the text and create a shortcut for it with the prefix ll (learn). This way when I am reading and come across a term I dont remember, I quickly type the shortcut in my scratch pad and am able to see the definition. This has really helped me memorize a lot of stuff.

This is a good opportunity to point out the new Hotkey preference in TextExpander 2 for creating snippets on the fly. You can designate the key combination you want to use for creating snippets from a selection or from the Clipboard in the TextExpander pane in System Preferences, under the “Preferences” tab.

Once you set the hotkey, all you have to do is select the content you want to make into a snippet and press the hotkey combination. The TextExpander pane will open and the selected contents will be pasted into the snippet content field. Assign an abbreviation and you’re done.

If you want to know more about the powerful design and printing capabilities of DiscLabel, check out the series of video tutorials we just posted on our website.

Produced by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline, this series covers new design creation, iTunes and iPhoto integration, design editing, using special effects and clip art, among other topics. It’s a fantastic introduction to DiscLabel, but even experienced DiscLabel users may learn something they didn’t know.

I also highly recommend checking out ScreenCastsOnline. It’s a terrifically informative series of Mac-related tutorials. There are free tutorials that you can subscribe to via iTunes. There is also a ScreenCastsOnline Extra! membership that entitles you to view the entire library of screencasts as well as special members-only content.

I have been an Extra! member for several months. Don’s tutorials have gotten me through lots of tricky stuff on the Mac, including upgrading to Leopard. He really does have a gift for knowing how much detail to provide–enough so that you do learn how to do something, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed.

Michael Mistretta at MacApper has posted a very good video review of TextExpander’s features. It covers the new TextExpander 2, so it makes a great sequel to Merlin Mann’s demo at MacBreak.

MacApper will also be giving away two copies of TextExpander:

In order to enter this giveaway, you must comment on this post with 3 of the most repetitve phrases that you use every day. Make us laugh. Alternately you can add some suggestions on what features you would like to see with TextExpander.

Some of the TextExpander abbreviations that have been posted certainly made me smile…

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.

TextExpander is coming to retail! You should be seeing it at your local Apple Store this month. It’s priced at $29.95 (same as the download version), and the box includes a CD with the software and a Quick Start card.

Send us your photos of TextExpander in the Apple Store. We’ve got lots of good photos of PDFpen. Now we want TextExpander!

The first person to send me a photo that we can post will win their choice of SmileOnMyMac software plus the fabulous limited-edition SmileOnMyMac coffee cup!

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.

Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks, wrote an article entitled “My Paperless Office” which appeared on his blog and the O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog. He writes about how he has been using his Fujitsu ScanSnap500M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

It sounds pretty cool how he’s managed to eliminate 3 boxes of stored paper. He uses DevonThink Pro Office to catalog and manage the PDFs, and PDFpen is part of the workflow too:

I normally use Skim to view PDFs, but while scanning I prefer PDFPen instead. It’s the perfect tool for this task because it lets me rearrange and delete pages within the finished PDF.

Gordon is also the contributor of one of our most popular TextExpander tips, on using the clipboard built-in macro.

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.