TE Snippets: Foreign Thanks

I’m starting a new series where I’m going to feature some of my favorite TextExpander snippets. If you don’t know about TextExpander, shame on you. It is a fantastic application that lets you quickly type long (and short) snippets of text with just a few keystrokes. It works on both the Mac and iOS and can make you look both smart and fast. Also, if you’ve got an interesting TextExpander library you’d like to share, let me know. I’m hoping we can all build a nice library together.

This snippet group is a list of ways to say thanks in foreign languages. When I get nice emails from international readers and listeners, I like to say thanks in their native language instead of mine. So I’ve been slowly building this snippet library with the name of the country (or language) followed by “thanks”. For instance, “filipinothanks” gets me “Salamat”. I’m always adding to the library but you can download the current iteration of this library below.

For more TextExpander snippets, clicky here.

Download Foreign Thanks

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TextExpander 4.04

The newest version of TextExpander for Mac is out with some nice improvements:

Supports Cut, Copy and Paste for items in the snippet list
Adds popover to resolve snippet abbreviation conflicts
Duplicate snippets are drawn with blue abbreviation (vs. orange for conflicts)
Adds “expand abbreviation ‘<abbreviation>’” syntax to AppleScript expand command
Restores support for %j day-of-year macro

There was, however a bug with the updater that requires you to manually download. You can get it here.

iOS OmniFocus ♥ TextExpander touch

Today’s iOS OmniFocus update is a doozy. The headline feature is the addition of iOS TextExpander support. As I’ve explained before, I aggressively use TextExpander snippets when creating tasks in OmniFocus. I even made a screencast about it. Now they work on the iPhone and iPad as well. I love that.

You can download a few of my OmniFocus related TextExpander snippets right here. In order to get them on your iOS device, install them in TextExpander on your Mac and use the Dropbox sync to transfer them over. If you don’t own a Mac, just create them manually in TextExpander Touch on your iOS device. These are really just a sampling. Once you get the idea, customize for whatever works for you.

While Apple added Keyboard Shortcuts with iOS 5, they are inferior to TextExpander shortcuts in several ways. First, they don’t synchronize. You have to add them manually to every single iOS device you own. (UPDATE: I’m told iOS 6 remedies this and Keyboard Shortcuts will sync between iOS devices.) TextExpander syncs to Dropbox and takes that tedium away. I find I create very few TextExpander snippets on my iOS devices and instead create them on the Mac and let Dropbox take care of the rest.

Also, there are some strange behaviors using the iOS Keyboard Shortcuts. Specifically, they need to be typed with no trailing characters. If you copy and paste text into a new OmniFocus entry and then move the cursor to the beginning of the pasted text to add a Keyboard Shortcut, it won’t work unless you add an additional space and then, using your finger, move the cursor back yet again another space before typing the Keyboard Shortcut. I found this vexing. With TextExpaner snippets in OmniFocus, the snippet fires whether or not there is an additional space. This makes a difference.

Another part of today’s iOS OmniFocus update is an improved synchronization with the native iOS Reminders database. This makes it much easier to synchronize these lists. The power tip here is that it gives you the ability to dictate with Siri to Reminders and have that automatically move over into OmniFocus. I use this feature every day and quite often. Again I made videos about this. However, the setup is simpler now than shown in the video.
The Siri command I use when adding items to my OmniFocus list is as follows:

“Add [task] to my reminders list.”

i.e., “Add fumigate DeathStar garbage room to my reminders list.”

OmniFocus watches the Reminders list titled “Reminders” (I appreciate that is confusing) and, once you open OmniFocus on your iPhone, incorporates any items found in the “Reminders” list to your OmniFocus inbox. This does not prevent you from having separate Reminders lists for other things. I, for instance, have Reminders list for Target, Groceries, and other running list type matters.

Overall, the addition of TextExpander support in OmniFocus is huge for me. I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks and couldn’t imagine going back. I’m guessing I’m not alone.

TextExpander Expense Snippet

I spent most of yesterday in court. As I fired off my TextExpander expense reporting snippet, it occurred to me, “people may like this.” This snippet creates a fill-in form with all the relevant boxes. I can use it in any text application, I usually do it in a blank Byword or Pages documents and staple receipts and the other relevant pieces of paper. Download it here.

Text Expander Snippet Repository? Yes Please.

Awhile back, I wrote about how nice it would be if we put together a web site to share TextExpander Snippets. Reader Alexander took the idea and ran with it. Opening its doors yesterday te-snippets.com is going to become the promised land for TextExpander nerds everywhere. Brett Terpstra is already in and once I get a moment to catch my breath, I’m going to post a several of my collections. If you have some interesting snippets to share or want to up your game, get to it.

TextExpander Markdown Snippets and Beyond

Brett is getting it together. His markdown snippets are more elegant than mine, which feel like the coding equivalent of Soviet-era public housing. Either way, I’m going to start pestering Brett to help out with this project and if you are a TextExpander/Markdown junkie, you should too.

This whole explosion of useful snippets resurrects an idea we kicked around at Macworld 2010. Why don’t we make a centralized depository for snippet bundles? There are a lot of nerds out there making some pretty fantastic snippets. Perhaps it is time we started sharing.

Supercharge TextExpander

Brett Terpstra has coded some remarkable TextExpander snippets including:

the ability to auto hyphenate the clipboard
encode e-mail addresses
paste markdown referenced
auto generate markdown references from your clipboard
create lorum ipsum text using text from word lists from Dune, Foundation, Ringworld, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who.

There is a lot more. If you are a TextExpander nerd, go here and then here. Now go!

TextExpander 3 Released

Today SmileOnMyMac released TextExpander 3. I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks and am sold. The big difference with the new version is user functionality.

There is a new quick entry window that makes creating new snippets a breeze. One of my favorite upgrades is the ability to set a key combination to edit the last expanded snippet. Correcting and updated snippets just got a lot easier.

It also now supports fill-in-the-blank snippets. You can create a snippet. “Dear Mr. _, I can’t help but notice your dog _ is beginning to smell funny. I suggest you give him a bath. Very truly yours, __.” Once you engage the snippet, a window opens with blank fields and you can tab between to fill in the data.

You can now search your snippets from the menubar. This is particularly helpful if you, like me, sometimes forget your abbreviations.

Also, TextExpander was liberated from the System Preferences window. It is now a separate application. This makes getting into TextExpander a lot easier. They also now have baked in support for Dropbox syncing which, while possible with version 2, required a bit of hoop jumping.

If that is not enough for you, the balloon icon also got an orange ribbon. Nifty. The upgrade price is $15, or free to users who purchased on or after November 1, 2009.

TextExpander Learns New Tricks

Today TextExpander released a particularly tasty update. For Gmail jockeys, there is now support for rich text and image expansion in web-based tools. I’ve already shown how to do this in Apple Mail.

My favorite new feature allows you designate a portion of your snippet to be selected following expansion. So what does this mean exactly? Well if I create the following snippet…

Your %|(Windows 2000)%\ PC has a virus.

… when you expand it, the term (Windows 2000) will be selected. You can then type in something else, i.e. “Windows XP”, to insert a different name.

Take a look at your existing snippet library. This is really useful. My latest text expansion project is building a library of my most frequent OmniFocus entries (more on this later). The new syntax is going to make this even better.

You can learn more here.