Congratulations! You’ve made it to Friday. To celebrate this international weekly accomplishment, we’re hereby instating Fun Fridays, where we post items that aim to increase your end-of-the-week jollification. Yay!
As fun is a relative term, we’ll try to vary the types of posts we do, to make sure there’s fun for everyone! On that note, if you have suggestions about what we should write about, you can pop over to this survey and let us know your ideas. This first post is of the Stuff We Like variety, which is for products or services that SurveyGizmo employees find fun and useful.
Today, we’ll be highlighting TextExpander by SmileOnMyMac.
And we’ll tell you what: we really love TextExpander.
In short, TextExpander saves us hours of typing. The software allows us to assign shortcuts to text that is written frequently, such as a long signature, frequently typed URLs, and frequently used CSS and HTML. So, instead of typing the whole signature, or copying and pasting it from a text file, I just type “SIG”, and TextExpander fills it in for me. This time-saving product increases efficiency, thus increasing our happy-vibes.
Just check out my usage stats:
9.72 hours is more than a regular workday! And I haven’t used it for a month yet. Stats like these are the reason we love TextExpander so much!
Two Tips for Successful Snippets:
- Modify the case of your shortcuts to reduce conflict with commonly typed words. So, instead of sig, which would interfere with the word signature, I make it SIG.
- Use commas or periods at the beginning of your snippets–this reduces most conflicts!
More Cool Features:
- TextExpander syncs with MobileMe.
- You can create snippets from selections, or from text copied into your clipboard.
- Text’s not all: it supports Rich Text, including photos and formatted text, Shell Scripts, and AppleScripts.
- There’s TextExpander for iPhone and iPod touch, goodie! You can download that here.
- For iPhone and iPod touch app integrates with cool apps like Tweetie and WriteRoom. See the full list of mobile apps that integrate here.
- They have pre-created HTML and CSS snippet groups for your coding convenience.
You can download a free trial of TextExpander, and buy the full version for a measley $29.95. TextExpander pays for itself when time equals money!
Apr. 17 
Apr. 5