OmniFocus 2 for iPhone adds TextExpander support

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s a small thing – well, probably a big job for The Omni Group to implement, I don’t know – but there is a strong chance you just squealed. I know I did.

TextExpander lets you type a short code like a couple of letters and have sentences, paragraphs or more complex text appear magically. It is great for things you repeatedly but actually it’s only really great on Macs: it works everywhere on Mac, everywhere, it’s perfect and I think mandatory. On iOS, it’s only able to be great if the app you’re using directly supports it.

Now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone supports TextExpander. Fantastic.

Very many of my tasks in OmniFocus start off as email messages that I get. I’ll routinely forward them to OmniFocus to deal with later but often I don’t bother to do anything more to help me out. If the subject is the famously useful “Re: re: re: re: re:” then maybe I’ll change it to something else. But often I don’t and later I’m not sure what the task was. With TextExpander, I can have a snippet – as it’s called – where by typing something like “aaa” will expand out to “Ask Angela about” and then I can type the rest or it can be the existing email subject.

I wish OmniFocus for iPad did this too but that’s being updated so I think you can be safe in assuming that TextExpander support will be in the next release.

Here’s OmniFocus in all its forms on the official Omni Group website. And here’s TextExpander.

MacPowerUsers on TextExpander

Posted by William Gallagher

They beat me to it: I can tell you now that the productivity tip in this Friday’s The Blank Screen newsletter will be to do with TextExpander. But today the MacPowerUsers podcast released an entire 90-minute episode devoted to it.

Katie Floyd and David Price were the final straw for me, the final reason it took to get me to try this software that they – and everyone – claims speeds up your typing. I like typing and I’m fast, I don’t want or need speeding up. But I tried it a year or so ago and now I am everyone. You need this.

One example: I regularly get asked for a link to my The Blank Screen book and obviously I love that. But at first I would go to the Amazon page and copy the URL for whoever asked. Then I got smart and did a shorter one that didn’t break in their email. But that short one is this: http://amzn.to/1dO1nue.

That’s for the UK. If you were an American asking me for it, I should instead remember to give you http://amzn.to/1756A8y which I think you will agree is far easier to trip off the tongue.

But with TextExpander, I found the link once and now just have a little shortcode for it. If I type the following, without the quote marks, “;tbsauk” TextExpander instantly springs that out into the full link for The Blank Screen, Amazon UK edition. Or “;tbsaus” does the US one.

Full disclosure: I use that several times a week on my Mac and it is exactly as quick and deliciously handy as it sounds. But I’m writing this to you on my iPad and that is different. TextExpander needs to get its feet under the table to work and Apple doesn’t allow that on iOS. There are ways it can work on Macs so it does, but for iPhones and iPad, TextExpander only works if the app you’re using allows it. None of Apple’s do. But an increasing number are and there is also the iOS TextExpander app. That’s for organising the stuff, writing new snippets as they’re called, but it also expands this stuff for you.

So I did nip over to that app to expand the “;tbsauk” and “;tbsaus” snippets.

That’s not as lightspeed fast as it is on Macs and consequently I use far fewer TextExpander snippets on this iPad, but in this case it was still quicker and easier to do than to go research the full links from Amazon all over again.

Listen to much more, and I think rather better explained, on the latest MacPowerUsers podcast episode. And then get TextExpander from the maker’s official site.

A bit specific: using Drafts to log what I’ve done

Posted by William Gallagher

I do a monthly report about what I’ve done – last year for a project called Room 204, this year for you, both years really for me – and it’s always been a bit easy because I make proper notes as I go. Except I forgot to do that in May. For the entire month, I forgot. Not once did it enter my head. Must’ve been a quiet month.

But these things really do help me so I didn’t want to forget again. If that sounds obvious, this will sound more obvious: I decided to use my iPhone to help me.

This is going to be really specific but please treat it as an idea of the type of things you can do rather than a recipe for exactly how I think you should do it. Also, please treat it as being infinitely faster to do than it is to describe.

This is what I do when I’ve done something I want to note:

Tap on Drafts on my iPhone

There’s rarely a minute my iPhone isn’t with me so whatever I’m doing, whatever I’ve just finished, I can easily tap on the Drafts app I keep on the home screen.

The thing with Drafts is that when it pops open, you start writing. (See second shot down there on the right.) Think later about where that text will go – is it an email, an iMessage, an Evernote entry? – just type for now. Plus I use TextExpander which is yet another app but it works with and within Drafts so I just type the letters XTD (TD for Today, X for just in case I ever need to write a real word beginning with TD) and the date appears.

Note written and Drafts has sent it

It’s the date plus a dash and a space. After that, I type as quickly as I can and then tap the Share button. What you’re seeing here is the end result: I’ve written my note about a thing I’ve done today (or am about to do, actually), then I’ve tapped on Share. Tapped on “Save for That Was Month” and Drafts has done it. It has sent that text to Evernote. It’s left up here so that I can choose to send it somewhere else but instead I just put it away. Next time I open Drafts, I’ve got a blank screen ready for anything else.

That’s it.

Except look at the shot below: that’s a grab from Evernote on my iPhone and you can see it shows that same text I just wrote in Drafts.

Drafts has sent that text to the end of a note. So I have a That Was Month note in Evernote and Drafts just keeps adding to the end of it. In some ways it’s even more satisfying than my old manual notes because you don’t think about it, you don’t see any of it but the latest, until you go in to check and there are all these things entered.

I should explain that you have to set up Drafts to do this. I don’t find that as easy as some people do but you can see I’ve done it a few times: as well as this That Was Month business, I have a Story Ideas option that does much the same thing. I think of something I can use in a script or a book, write it down, tap Story Ideas and it’s off into an Evernote note.

And I have a general Save to Evernote which, actually, I’ve never used. There are other options below it such as Send to OmniFocus or Email or whatever. A lot of those come with Drafts, the others I’ve gone through setting up what I want. Telling Drafts I want to send text to this particular app or service, to add it as a new note or append to a particular old one, that kind of thing.

How long did that take you to read? Divide it by oodles and that’s how quick it is to use this thing. Which, frankly, means I use it. Did I mention that I have Drafts on my iPad too? So if I’m working on that, wallop, same thing. I don’t believe there’s a Drafts for Mac and maybe I wouldn’t buy it if there were: it would seem daft using it on a Mac when I have Word and Pages already.

So you know, this is what all this costs and where to get it. Everything but the iPhone, that’s up to you:

Drafts for iPhone: £2.49 UK, $3.99 US

Drafts for iPad: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

Evernote for iPhone: free

Evernote for iPad: free

TextExpander for iOS: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

The good, bad and dangerous of email signatures

Posted by William Gallagher

Automatically putting your contact details at the end an email can be great, handy, daft, silly or even sometimes a little bit dangerous.

You want to know about the dangerous bit, don't you? And I want to tell you. I'm going to be a little circumspect because the person involved could conceivably read this and I don't to either upset her or open the story back up again.

It's like this. I'm a freelance writer, it is handy for me to give you a way to phone or email if you have some work you think I'd enjoy. So a long time ago, back in the 1990s, I used to include my mobile phone in the signature on all my emails. All my emails. That's the point, isn't it? You write this automatic block of text called a signature, you write it once, you never think about it again. I never thought about it again. Until a woman saw it – I'm going to do that anonymous name thing and call her Pentangle. No idea why.

I knew Pentangle but it had been a gigantic number of years since we'd been even in the same city, I believe, so whatever way we found each other online, I was glad and it was fun. Except I sent her a cheery email and it included my phone number as all my emails did.

She went quiet.

And after a few days emailed back saying she'd been in some turmoil about my giving her my number like that. Did I expect her to give me hers? What would her husband say? If you're reading this like it's a joke then I'm doing a bad job: she was serious and it was a big thing for her. I'm ashamed to say I joked it off: it didn't occur to me that she could really be this serious. I tell you, nobody fancies me, it just doesn't happen, I wouldn't notice or understand if it did. But something like it was happening then.

I hadn't met her since those years before, this was all innocuous email stuff and actually to this day I have not met her. But it spiralled off into her consulting her minister for advice about what to do, it went to late night phone calls from her, it went to my being CCd on emails about me that she'd sent to her friends.

It only stopped when she went in to hospital to be treated for some mental health issues. I don't know what, I didn't really dare ask her for fear of exacerbating whatever was happening, and it's now a long time since I heard from her. I often think of her and hope she's okay, but.

So that took longer to tell you than I expected. Sorry about that. Let me skip straight to the happier, sillier, dafter end of things. There is a tremendous spoof of legal email signatures written by the site McSweeney's.

For real examples of how not to do it, advertising guy Ken Segall wrote back in 2012 about the signatures that came on his phone by default – and one that is a lot worse than “Sent from my iPhone” – and he has suggested alternatives.

Yet it genuinely is handy for certain people to have your phone number. You want them to. And you can say that to them in one email but nobody remembers which email you mentioned your number in. So whacking it at the end of them all, could genuinely be useful.

The issue is not the usefulness, it's not the bit about it being at the end of your email, it's the word 'all'. That's where this goes so very badly wrong.

So right now, I have no signature at all. Not one. Not a pixel. I've certainly deleted the “Sent from my iPad” and not just because I was emailing someone who believed I was working for them on the Mac in my office. Instead, most emails I send out get no signature – and all the ones that could use one, do.

I do it through TextExpander from Smile Software. When I'm at my Mac and I'm emailing you, if any part of the back of my head thinks you could use my contact details, I type “;sigw” (without the quote marks) and, wallop, it's all there. An entire signature with contact details and a couple of links. That's my work signature; I intended to do a “;sigp” with my personal signature, but I've never bothered.

It's great on my Mac because even though I type very quickly, that just means I've rattled off “;sigw” at lightspeed and the rest of the text is there within a beat. It's not so good on my iPad and iPhone: there is a TextExpander for iOS but it can't insert itself into Mail in the same way. If I'm that fussed, I will go to the TextExpander app, type “;sigw” and copy-and-paste it into the email but generally I don't tend to be that fussed.

But I am fussed enough, especially on my Mac, that I do this TextExpander lark a lot – and it has paid off as an email to one person gets forward to another and suddenly I'm getting work from strangers.

Thanksgiving bargain: get TextExpander (Mac) for 50% off

Posted by wg

I actually enjoy typing, I seriously do. I can’t handwrite, I can’t think with a pen, I can only work and fashion words or thoughts with a keyboard. So I resisted TextExpander for years: it’s a Mac utility that lets you type, say, “;em” and if you do it without the speech marks, it types out your email address.

It’s up to you what those letters are, it’s up to you what text gets expanded. Since I started writing Doctor Who stories, for instance, some fans made a Wikipedia entry for me and I am chuffed about that. I chuff about it enough that it’s handy to be able to type “;wiki” and have TextExpander change that to the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gallagher_(writer)

That probably happened too quickly for you to see.

I use TextExpander instead of email signatures: I’m not really a fan of signatures but since I write for so many different people in so many different forms, it’s really handy to be able to sign off with a link to my books if I’m writing to a publisher, to my journalism if I’m emailing a magazine. So I do that. And I do the wiki thing and I do the email address. I do my bank details too: because I keep forgetting them and you don’t want to get a digit wrong in that.

I also have a rather complicated TextExpander snippet – they’re called snippets – which I run when I’ve started a particular email. Two keys and it’s filled out the recipient, the subject, the body copy of the message and has thrown up a form asking me for the bits that change. It’s a financial thing so it asks me about this account and that invoicing amount and then it pops all that into the message, signs it off and I just hit send.

So I still love typing but I use TextExpander more and more to do more and more of the repetitive, ordinary typing. I installed it back in June and its internal look-at-me statistics panel stays it has saved me 78.88 hours of typing. I am highly suspicious of the maths behind that, but there is no question that it works very well for me and that I’ve come to lean on it a lot. There’s definitely no question because I routinely find it a right pain that you can’t do the same thing on iOS.

(There is a TextExpander for iOS but it’s handicapped by Apple’s app rules and actually right now the firm is nattering with Apple because it’s going to have to change how it does what little it does there.)

But.

The whole point of this is by way of telling you first that there is this thing called TextExpander which is as good as advertised, and second that it is currently on sale.

From about now until Monday 2 December, 2013, it’s 50% off. That makes it £13.47 and just typing those digits makes me wince: I paid twice that. I know it’s worth it. But when it was the full price it was just expensive enough to make me hesitate; at £13.47 I’d have bought it in a bilnk. Let me recommend that you buy it in a blink.

To get the offer, you need to follow this link: http://sites.fastspring.com/smile/product/te?coupon=TE2013BFF

I don’t get any kickback for that, I just get the kick out of knowing that you’re going to have a good time with it.