About

PTO helps over 5000 subscribers work smarter, play harder, and live happy lives. Subscribe or learn more...

Outsourcery: the dark art of personal outsourcing

The 22% Club: All Aboard for Blog Action Day

Ditch The Digital Itch: Drop Feed Readers Today

OFFCON: The Office Terror Alert Scale

Wordprezzie and The One Month Launch

Typinator IV: The Typing Shortcut Shoot-out

by Nick Cernis | 2 July 2008

Nick says: In the Terminator films, we watched from behind our sofas as a Californian Governor fought to save humankind from an army of glorified, time travelling toasters. The software shoot-out below presents an equally epic battle between man and machine, with one exception: your guide is not the gun ho and battle-hardened temptress Sarah Connor, but writer and musician Joel Falconer.

Typing Shortcut Shoot-out (OSX and Windows)

by Joel Falconer

If I told you there was a way to automate a good chunk of your typing in a given day, would you be interested?

Typing shortcut utilities work by assigning a few characters or words to a longer block of text. When you type those specific characters, the software jumps in and swaps them out for the block of text you’ve set. Each grouping of a keystroke and text is called a ’snippet’.

For instance, I might type ‘esig1′, and the app will replace that text with my email signature.

It might sound trivial, but you can save massive amounts of time. My favourite utility, which provides stats in case you’re wondering whether it’s all worth it, tells me I’ve saved roughly 100 hours over the past year thanks to text expansion alone. All that from a “simple little program”.

Why use typing shortcut software?

It’s a cliché, but the possibilities for increased productivity are endless. Well, only limited by the number of variations you can make with your keyboard. Here are some ideas:

When you check your inbox, do you have emails that ask the same questions of you again and again? Quit repeating the performance.
Have your computer instantly correct common typos
Have access to a range of different email signatures, only a few keystrokes away.
Developers can save huge amounts of time by providing instant access to a whole range of code snippets that are frequently used in a project.
If you provide support by email, the ability to answer queries about common problems with a short text snippet is much better than hunting through your files for a template.

Now you’ve seen how they’re used, let’s get on with our shoot-out.

Mac OS X Apps

TextExpander

TextExpander weighs in at a 3.9-megabyte download and costs US$29.95. I initially balked at the price when seemingly equivalent apps were selling for much less, but the quality of the user experience is great and typing shortcut utilities are very much underrated as far as their usefulness goes. I’ve since come to believe that $29.95 is a fair price, and while I wouldn’t mark it up further, I also wouldn’t mark it down.

Features
One of my favourite features of TextExpander is its ability to create a snippet from a selection or the clipboard. Because creating a snippet from a selection doesn’t seem to work in some applications like Word 2008 or Flock, which was disappointing, I ended up using the Create Snippet from Clipboard much more frequently.

Power features
TextExpander has a fantastic power user feature: snippet nesting. You can create a snippet that references other snippets and expands them. This is especially useful for crafting email signatures. If you have a heap of snippets for a range of situations, then some of them will call on the same information; for instance, your name, phone number, email address, and so on. While it’s unlikely you’ll be changing your name, if one of those details does change you have to go through each snippet and update it. For me, this would take at least an hour.

Let’s use the email signature example. If you have ten signatures and your phone number changes, you have to update all ten signatures. But if your signatures reference another snippet that contains your phone number, you only need to make one modification. Damn, efficiency or what?

Speed of launch
This may be a side effect of my Mac Mini’s age, or it could be the way TextExpander is coded, but loading the preference pane can be pretty slow. It opens the System Preferences app and then hangs for a second while it moves into the TextExpander screen. For most apps, this isn’t so bad because preferences are rarely touched. I create a new snippet for TextExpander a couple of times a day (usually), so it does get a bit annoying. [Nick says: I use TextExpander and don't have this problem. Your mileage may vary!]

Typinator

At 1.8mb, the download package for Typinator is smaller than TextExpander’s and presumably more lightweight. With this kind of app, the more lightweight, the better. At 19.99 Euros, it works out to be a dollar or two more expensive than TextExpander — no deal-breaker there.

First impressions
When I downloaded Typinator to test it out, the first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t run it from the disk image like you can with pretty much any other app. This irked me a little because I already had TextExpander installed and wanted to test this app before installing it.

Granted, TextExpander requires an installation because it runs out of your System Preferences, but because Typinator works like an average app and doesn’t require a preference pane I didn’t see an obvious reason for this.

I found the software’s configuration panels pretty confusing. It is simple enough to use once you spend some time figuring it out, but the interface doesn’t intuitively guide the user to the next step.

Limited trial version
Typinator’s trial version allows you to test the software freely using TextEdit, but I don’t know anyone who does the bulk of their writing — or any, really — in that app. When you try to use the software anywhere else, the software pops up a registration box every few seconds.

I totally get the developer’s need to ensure that their software gets sold, but testing an application like this requires that you test it as part of your workflow for a while without interruptions. I think this is hurting each user’s trial experience and thus hurting sales, when a simple 14 or 30 day limit would do the trick.

Speed
On the flip side, Typinator does seem to drop in the replacement text a bit faster. I liked this because I use typo auto-correction in TextExpander and on occasion it’s minutely slow and I end up trying to fix the typo at the same time it does. This delay is only by a couple of milliseconds but when you write for a living or spend a lot of time at the computer you try to fix typos so quickly it’s more instinct than conscious decision.

Mac OS X Winner: TextExpander

Typinator works fine if you want something that is lightweight and simple, but if you want power user features in exchange for a slightly less lightweight app, TextExpander does the trick.

Windows Apps

FasterFox

Coming down the pipes at 165kb, FasterFox is the lightest program of the bunch. It was evident before I even installed the program that this app, which can be had for US$39, was going for the crowd who like their apps super-fast and super-simple, without many power user features.

Installation
During the installation process, a Select Related Programs screen came up with two boxes pre-selected, to download the company’s other software. This looked very similar to a Customize Installation screen, which many Windows users don’t even glance at, just trusting the default install settings and pressing next.

This irked me. It was clearly marked as a “Related Programs” screen but making it look like part of the installation with two boxes already ticked seems deceptive to me. And if FastFox was freeware, it might even be forgivable - got to make money somehow - but it’s not freeware, and this is a trial for a commercial program. From a developer’s standpoint, creating a great experience and making the software integral to the user’s daily workflow during that 30-day period is essential to making the sale.

Ease-of-use
Ending rant and moving along. After the installation the program opened and I was shown the snippet setup page. It’s laid out intuitively and there’s really no question as to what to do next. FastFox is very easy to set up and configure, and refreshingly simple compared to the Mac counterparts I tested.

Triggers and speed
However, unlike both Mac apps, FastFox doesn’t convert an abbreviation to a snippet immediately; you have to type another character or a space before it performs the conversion (called a “trigger”). I can almost see the sense in doing it this way, but I prefer the immediate conversion. It’s faster, especially when you’re using a snippet for, say, an email reply, which doesn’t require tapping the keyboard one more time only to delete the extra character.

In terms of the time it takes to actually perform the conversion, FastFox truly is fast as a fox.

Overall opinion
The beauty of FastFox is its simplicity. TextExpander, for example, offers plenty of power user features, which I love - but FastFox has a different appeal by offering as few options as possible.

The by-and-large good experience I had with FastFox after getting past the initial irritation during the setup procedure was tainted again as I closed the app, and it opened a page in my browser to sign up for their newsletter. No, thanks.

PhraseExpress

From the moment I started installing PhraseExpress I knew it wouldn’t be as simple as FastFox; it offers half a million options during the installation alone. PhraseExpress is the cheapest of the bunch because it’s free for personal use, but if you’re a business user, you’ll need to plonk down US$49.95.

Feature-rich but easy to use
Despite the software’s added complexity, the configuration is an easy process. One of the first things I noticed, thanks to the intuitive user interface, was that it was very easy to set a hotkey (such as Shift+Ctrl+Q) for a single snippet. I figure you’d have to be using that snippet at least a few times per hour for it to warrant a hotkey, but this could be a handy feature if you’re in tech support and have five questions that are asked more than others.

Features and triggers
PhraseExpress also has a Clipboard Cache in the same window used to create new snippets, which makes it easy to create not only a snippet from your most recent clipboard, but the last several. Unfortunately, you can’t set a hotkey to make your current selection or clipboard into a new snippet - you have to go in there and do it yourself.

This app actually had the same annoyance I encountered with FastFox: it doesn’t drop the replacement text in until after you’ve added a space or an extra character at the end. Maybe it’s just me, but I find this hurts the software more than it helps.

Fun with stats
PhraseExpress has a very cool stats page. It’s much like TextExpander’s, but has a 90%-fun-10%-gimmicky feature - calculating not only how much time you’ve saved, but how much money you’ve saved, by throwing your hourly wage into the equation. It also allows you to set your average typing rate to make the stats more accurate.

Windows winner: PhraseExpress

While I love the pure simplicity of FastFox, PhraseExpress manages to include a bunch of power user features without confusing the user.

Try one out today

If you’re not using a typing shortcut utility (what a mouthful — a text expander would be a good alternative if it weren’t already a commercial application) I suggest you find the application that suits you best and buy it. It will save you so much time, and probably some wrist pain too.

If you’re using something else or want to share your thoughts, feel free to drop a comment below.

Joel Falconer is a writer, editor, musician and songwriter. He writes at joelfalconer.com. Check out his site today!

Stumble this post Get free email updates for new posts

16 comments so far:

2 Jul 08
12:07

James Chartrand - Men with Pens

Want to know what I’d like to see reviews on? Speech-to-text applications and programs. I am *so* interested in that but I’m not willing to plunk down money just to try.

Yet.