You don’t realise it, but there’s a lot of text that you type repeatedly. It may be your name, email address, a sign off, a signature, or even an entire email. What would you say about cutting down on typing those and saving a few hours?

Smile on my mac has a very special software under their belt, which is TextExpander. True to its name, it expands text. To give you a quick example, if I type SA, be it in my browser, email client, or a Photoshop text label, it will expand to Smoking Apples. Of course there’s more to this than just that, so let’s burrow into it.

How TextExpander works.

TextExpander installs into your system preferences. Everything needs to be managed within this preference pane. The little menubar icon sits there as a handy shortcut to all your ‘snippets’.

Snippets are the heart of TextExpander. A snippet is a piece of text, with a shortcut attached to it. The piece of text can be anything. It can be formatted, HTML, or even an image! The shortcut on the other hand is preferably something you wouldn’t type on a day to day basis, and short enough so you can actually save time.

TextExpander can expanding capabilities extend in a bunch of different ways. The snippets organiser keeps all your snippets in a list, and can be organised into groups. Clicking the new snippet button lets you enter the content, give that snippet a label (which will show up in the snippet organiser instead of the content), and then the abbreviation that you choose.

Snippets

Apart from creating basic text snippets, you can add pictures, as well as some text variables like for instance, today’s date! The text variable drop down list allows you to format the way you want the date to be shown.

The text variable drop down list also allows you to insert the time, the clipboard or even another snippet. New in version 2.5, you can insert a conditional date or time. So if you keep having to tell people to give back your cash 1 week later, instead of hunting for the date, you can just set a snippet to expand the date 7 days from now.

HTML writers will be pleased to know that you can have your cursor move to any desired position. For instance, if you want to insert a link tag, you can set the shortcut to expand to <a href=”“> and make your cursor be placed in between the quotes!

Another way to add snippets via the menubar. Using the menubar shortcut, you can create a snippet from the current selection of text, or from your clipboard.

Preferences

Application-specific expanding
You can set any snippet or snippet group, to be include or exclude any number of applications. So if you don’t want your ‘tnx’ shortcut to expand in your chat window, you can exclude that from the list. And of course, the reverse of that is also possible. Similar preferences can also be set globally, that is, for all your snippets and groups. 

MobileMe syncing
TextExpander can sync all of your snippets across computers using your MobileMe account. Using the WebDAV protocol (transparent to the user), I found it a joy to have my snippets be synced on my iBook as well as iMac. A single user license can be used across computers (as long as you are the user).

Snippet options
There’s a bunch of different options for organising your snippets. For once you can organise them by content, abbreviation, or according to which snippets were used most recently. You can also save the snippets or groups, and even print them out (for what purpose, I wouldn’t know). 

Expand count
TextExpander gives you information on how many times you have expanded snippets, how many characters you have saved yourself from typing, and calculates the time you have saved at 400 characters per minute!

Download Snippets
Smile on my Mac provides you with a bunch of snippet groups that you can download, use, and edit to your liking. There’s snippet groups for HTML and CSS code, autocorrect dictionaries, and some date conversion utilities. And, you can find special snippets like using AppleScript to automatically create a shorturl on the developer’s blog. 

Who is TextExpander for?

Everyone. Within the three weeks that I’ve been reviewing it, I saved a little over 1 hour of typing, which is a lot. From web forms to email signatures, I’ve used it all over. Anyone from professionals, code writers, businessmen, writers or even ‘regular’ home users will find TextExpander to be of great use. Basically, anyone who uses a computer for a large part of their work needs TextExpander. 

TextExpander sells for $30 at the Smile on my Mac store. Of course, you can use the free trial to check out whether this app fits into your workflow.