SmileOnMyMac Blog

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.

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!

How Does Your Mac Make You Smile?

Your answer to this question could win you the new, shiny, irrestible, adorable iPod nano! Today we announced this contest. All the details and entry form can be found at the contest page on our site.

We’ll be giving away up to five nanos! The more entries we get, the more prizes we’ll add. And everyone who enters will be eligible for a random drawing for five copies of TextExpander. Plus, every contestant will get a discount coupon for SmileOnMyMac software.

The best answers, as judged by Shawn and Lesa King of Your Mac Life, will win the nanos. The deadline for entries is November 6, 2007, and the winners will be announced on November 7, 2007. So go ahead and enter!

Most of my working day, I am sending emails to two people: Greg and Philip, SmileOnMyMac’s co-founders and software developers. After reading Send: The Essential Guide to Email, I decided to more consistently open the emails with “Hi Greg,” “Hi Philip,” and sometimes, “Hi Greg and Philip,” to be a bit less cold.

A lot of us have a mental block against setting up TextExpander snippets for really short things like these phrases, which are 10, 12 and 21 keystrokes each (when you include hitting “Enter” twice, as I invariably do.) You have to use a minimum of 2 keystrokes to trigger the snippet expansion, so how much time do you really save?

This week, I decided to add “Hg” and “Hp” to TextExpander, as well as “HG” for “Hi Greg and Philip,”. And I got curious about how much time would this save me.

Over the past two years, I’ve sent 1145 emails to Greg, 532 emails to Philip and 839 emails addressed to both of them. Subtracting the 2 keystrokes for the abbreviation, I came up with 30,421 keystrokes I could have saved.

When TextExpander calculates how much time you save, it assumes you type 400 characters/minute. But I knew I couldn’t type the “Hi” phrases at that rate, so I tested myself. (Among other things, the iPhone has a great stopwatch…) At the rate, I actually type those phrases (200 characters/minute), I could have saved 2 hours and 32 minutes.

The happiness of finding something else I won’t have to type out over and over again: priceless.

Last weekend, the Houston Area Apple Users Group held their annual day-long MacFest and SmileOnMyMac was one of the sponsors. I went down to demo our products at the MacFest and had a GREAT time. My first visit to Texas!

Lesa King, co-host of Your Mac Life and my pal, was one of the speakers, along with Andy Ihnatko, Bob LeVitus and Chris Breen. I learned a lot from listening in on their sessions. I also got to eat barbecue and Tex-Mex, of course. The HAAUG folks were really nice, and I especially loved meeting SmileOnMyMac customers who came up to me to tell me how much they loved our programs.

Lesa and I gave presentations at the Apple Store in the Houston Galleria, hers covering Digital Photography and mine about PDFpen. Since we were there at the store, I asked Lesa (who is a big fan of PDFpen) to pose for another entry in our gallery of Apple Store photos!

For the second entry in our new “Smileworthy” category, in which we highlight software we like and use from other software companies, we chose SpamSieve. Like our first entry, LaunchBar, Philip, Greg and I all use this. It is another application we would not want to live without.

SpamSieve will keep your email inbox nearly free of unwanted email. It uses Bayesian filtering to determine if an email is spam. And it is smart! It gets better at filtering the longer you use it. If something spammy gets by SpamSieve, you mark it as spam and SpamSieve learns from that. Likewise, if a “good” email is snagged by SpamSieve, you can mark it as such.

In practice, I get a few spam emails in my inbox everyday, but the vast majority go into the Spam folder automatically. I rarely get a “false positive,” i.e. a good email that is falsely sent to the Spam folder.

Another thing we at SmileOnMyMac can really appreciate: great customer support. All my emails to the developer are answered very promptly–and very helpfully.