Essentials: TextExpander

I just wrote this on MacNN.com:

Get this essential Mac tool for speeding up your typing

Here’s the thing: yes, TextExpander speeds up your typing, but some of us like typing — and some of us are 120 words per minute. If you’re one of the latter, that doesn’t automatically rule out that you wouldn’t be interested in the venerable TextExpander’s speed, but we figured it wouldn’t be that much use to us; or so we thought. Doubtlessly, if you are a slower typist, then the speed is the key reason to buy TextExpander — but it does so much else, it is so useful in other ways, that we are now dependent on it, and wish we’d bought it ten years ago.

Hands On: TextExpander 4 for OS X, TextExpander 3 for iOS – William Gallagher, Electronista (18 January 2015

Well, I wrote that and then I wrote a lot more, almost every bit of it finding new ways to enthuse about this software. It is that good, seriously. I found out while writing this review that I’ve been using TextExpander for 10 months. Can’t believe it – and yet I find that easier to comprehend than the fact that there was ever a time I wasn’t.

Read the full piece.

TextExpander Touch updated, improved

Posted by William Gallagher

It is still harder to type on iOS devices with the TextExpander keyboard but a new 3.1 release plus iOS 8.0.2 has improved things. You want this because the very best use of the new iOS keyboarded feature is TextExpander and it is tantalisingly close to great.

The iOS 8.0.2 update has fixed the bug that meant you had to keep switching the keyboard on and off in Settings to get it to work. That’s a big thing, it would be the biggest thing except there is also now auto-correction.

A bit.

I don’t understand how it can have a bit of autocorrection. It’s as if developers don’t have access to the iOS autocorrection feature and so have to implement one themselves. That seems an enormous waste of effort and doubly so since it isn’t working. Whereas the TextExpander keyboard previously gave me no corrections at all, this one does some. Not many and not the same ones that the regular Apple keyboard does.

This wouldn’t matter a huge amount except that it is harder to type on the TextExpander keyboard than it is on the regular one. So the keyboard that is meant to speed you up with TextExpander snippets does speed you up – and slows you down too.

These new keyboards for iOS are solely for when you are typing on the glass of your device: they can’t use Bluetooth external keyboards. So I’m trying to write this on the glass of my iPad Air and I’m doing fine – except that I had to give up doing it on the TextExpander keyboard.

But at least I had a go where previously I couldn’t last a sentence.

One other improvement. TextExpander touch had one very good sound – the kind of bleep it gives when it expands some text – and one very irritating sound with the clicking keyboard. Before this update, you got both sounds or you got none. I couldn’t bear the clicking keys so I had nothing.

I so want this to work.

TextExpander touch 3.1 is available now in the App Store

Ode to a keyboard and what typing is owed

Posted by William Gallagher

Seth Godin on how we are moving from keyboards to touch screens and from typing to swiping:

Many people are quietly giving away one of the most powerful tools ever created—the ability to craft and spread revolutionary ideas. Coding, writing, persuading, calculating—they still matter. Yes, of course the media that’s being created on the spot, the live, the intuitive, this matters. But that doesn’t mean we don’t desperately need people like you to dig in and type.

Without a keyboard – Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog (14 September 2014)

His full piece doesn’t add a giant amount more to this one point – but his blog adds much to everything. Hugely recommended. Even before he said what I didn’t realise I think about keyboards.