Text Expander is one of those tools that just keeps giving. The more you use it, the more you will get out of it. It does what it says it does. It expands the snippets of text into sentences, time stamps, tags… You name it, TextExpander does it!
Text expansion is not a necessity, but it certainly does help. Regardless of me being fast, this tool makes me even faster! Additionally there is one snippet that makes it truly fascinating, and that I use day in and day out. It’s time stamping. And here’s the example of it: 09–28–2012 12:52. In order for me to get the accurate time stamp, all I had to do was to type “1 d t” (together) and I would get exact time and date, in the format that I prefer.
Naming convention and Text Expander
This is actually important for naming conventions that I am starting to practice on my computer and in my filing system. As I am drifting away from Evernote to File System (for some of my needs), this is becoming more and more handy feature.
Dropbox support
But the real reason why text expander is so great is because it has Dropbox support, which syncs the snippets with your iOS devices. Now the real game begins. Text Expander for iOS works on iPhone and iPad, and allows you to cut those long words and phrases into simple snippets.
A couple of snippets that I started using:
- 1twb = Link to My Twitter account
- 1fae = Link to my blogs Facebook Page
- 1grav = my gravatar email (for the purposes of blog commenting)
- 1bae = my name for blog commenting purposes
- 1sig1 = Default signature
- 1home = my home address
- 1ph = my phone number
- 1em = my email
- 1tt = current time stamp
- 1dd = current date stamp
- 1dt = current time and date stamp
- 1pz = my most common expense (250 dinars worth of chicken)
- 1pi = chicken
- 1wi = writing ideas
- 1link = example link
Snippets and brain muscle
For the time being this is more than enough snippets for me. It will take some time for my brain muscle to adapt and apply all of these snippets before I start expanding the list.
Is text expander the right tool for you?
I believe that any web professional can benefit from the text expansion. It has short learning curve to use the software, but requires a bit of time to get accustomed to the snippets.
The iOS counterpart works great with my favorite apps like:
And numerous others… If you use any of these apps, and you type often on your iOS devices, text expander is very well worth the effort and time invested. It works better than native text expansion found within iOS, as it expands more quickly, and doesn’t require additional typing of space button when your snippet is done.
If you are still having doubts on whether you should try it out or not, hop over to their website, and check out their screencasts for ideas on how to use it, and how it can benefit you.
Conclusion
For 5$ investment in iOS App you will save yourself a bunch of time. The OS X version costs 35$, but if you are not sure you want to invest that kind of money in the application, Smile Software found a solution for that problem of yours. The desktop version comes with a free 30 day trial, but once it expires, they still let you use the software, just reminder that you should buy it, becomes more frequent. And I believe as they make other great apps, that you will benefit from supporting awesome people from Smile Software.
