[…] TypeIt4Me is a mega-clipboard that takes in all the macros you can throw at it. At one end of its spectrum, I’ve made it so that I will never mis-type the definite article as teh again, along with eliminating many other common finger-gaffes. At the other extreme, it’s got whole form letters pasted into it for über-efficient emailing. It is also great for inserting things you type regularly even when you’re not being a cold, soulless robot (letter closings, for example, or special characters) and particularly for HTML tags; the code I use for most photo borders here looks like this: style=”border:solid 1px #000000; padding: 8px;” I love that I will never have to type all that again. Now when I want a border, I tell the keyboard stylpad and it “auto-corrects” this to the tag. (If I want to go back to the original unpadded grey borders, I tell it cdcd.) I have similar macros defined for pretty much everything I might need to do code-wise. This probably means I will forget whatever scraps of HTML I once knew, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice in the name of laziness. Avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome and halving your keystrokes must be worth $27. For a proper review and a link to a similar rig for Windows, see Merlin Mann’s archives here. […]

I would definitely suggest not storing passwords in TypeIt4Me, as convenient as they might be. They’re more or less accessible to anyone at that point and are probably in plaintext in the application itself.

Apple makes a great utility called Keychain that works very well at this task. The integration with Safari and OmniWeb is seamless. It’s also just as portable as the TypeIt4Me idea—practically not at all.

Well-written review! As another option, I’d like to recommend Rainmaker’s Spell Catcher, which used to be distributed by Casady & Greene before they went out of business.

The original developer reclaimed the rights for it and has been developing and selling it ever since. Not only does it have TypeIt4Me’s abbreviation capabilities (unwieldily called “Shorthand Glossary expansions” here) - it also has a full-fledged, multilingual spell checker and thesaurus which works across all OS X applications, and also integrates with the built-in OS X spell checker / dictionary.

Spell Catcher also has powerful text manipulation features including actions like “Strip Whitespace”, “Quote” (for email-style quoting, including word wrapping), “Strip Characters”, “Form Paragraphs”, and many others.

I’ve been using it for just over a year now and it’s incredible. I have no connection whatsoever with the developer; just a very happy customer.

I would definitely suggest not storing passwords in TypeIt4Me

I think that’s absolutely good advice for your important “low-level” passwords, and I do wish all OSX apps would store only in the keychain.

But for frequently-used trivial passwords (thinking here of your “hamburger helper” web password MD5-able with Nic’s Bookmaklet, it seems not such a terrible idea. Depends on how public your mac is, how good you are about logging out, and, ultimately, how much security you’re willing to trade off for convenience, I guess.

Great advice though!

Mark and I have talked about Typeit4me. He tried to introduce me to the developer of the program. As we would really like work with someone to build a version of ActiveWords for the Mac, so if anyone out there knows someone who might, we would gladly work out a deal to license our code. The key difference between ActiveWords and Typeit4me is that we do 8 things including text substitution. We allow you to launch applications, open files folders and drives, etc.

We allow the user to use words, acronyms or event phrases to trigger ActiveWords, and we work application and context free.

We have also built a lot of agents that work with our built in scripting language. We had some fun yesterday beginning to build an agent for www.skype.com. If anyone has any questions about ActiveWords, let me know, and if you are using a Mac, by all means try Typeit4me, I would love to see its developers do well too!

We would like to think that with ActiveWords the limiting factor becomes your imagination.

You can do this with vim fairly easy. Google for “vim abbreviations”. Since I do most of my writing in vim, that’s where I most need abbreviations. I sure wouldn’t want this program to change what I’m typing in a shell. There, “ex” really means something.

It’s nothing like as comprehensive, and nowhere close to Buzz’s ActiveWords, but Shortkeys Lite is worth a go for Windows users (sorry, I know, I’m evil ;) - and it has the nice advantage of being free. You have to define a ‘trigger’ that goes before or after the text you want to expand - I use “##”, then, for example, “##d” will insert the date and time in my chosen format - 2004-09-26 11:06 :: - ready to prefix whatever I want to datestamp. Also inserts simple words, phrases, URLs, or whatever else.

http://www.shortkeys.com/lite.htm

Great review, Mark. And thanks for inviting him to the party, Merlin. You’ve always been one for great parties.

So, TypeIt4Me honestly surprised me this morning. After eagerly installing it to try out some of Mark’s tips it did something completely unexpected.

It told me to restart my Mac.

That made me nervous. Nobody makes me restart my machine anymore, with the exception of Apple and their security updates. Reminds me of the OS 7/8/9 days when I would have to restart my Mac just to get fonts to show up.

It’s not a big deal, really. But it gets at the bigger issue of how robust the Mac shareware community is. I install little apps every day, check them out, throw them away. In fact, I usually don’t install them. I just run them from the .dmg. And now, just to check this app out, I have to quit all my running processes (and loose their “state” — like which docs where open, etc.), relaunch everything, log back into my servers, etc. etc.

Ah, I’m ranting. But you get my point. Mac software rules primarily because of it unobtrusiveness. This ain’t.

Excellent review. Typeit4me would be a perfect app, were it not for the lack of an important feature for web developers and programmers such as myself: control of the insertion point. When I type “ahr” to get <a href=”“></a>, I still have to move my cursor back to the href property value. The BBEdit glossary allows you to include an #INSERTION# placeholder to control where the cursor is placed, but I have to rememeber a multi-key shortcut, which limits the number of potential macros.

I’m always intrigued by utilities like this, and there’s never a shortage of them for whatever my environment of choice might be at any moment. But I do find they lock me in, and they’re not portable, and you just get too darned used to them. As a PC tech dude, whether I’m working corporate or freelancing as now, I’m forever wanting to use a shortcut or utility when I’m at a client’s machine, and it ain’t there. Much as I like playing with these toys, I tend not to miss them all that much when I’m starting over fresh.

(Similarly, I’m one of those obviously-fooling-himself guys who thinks he can type faster with a Dvorak keyboard. Although it isn’t as much effort as I expected to switch layouts, the amount of time I spend on Qwerty machines forces me to stick with the standard.)

And when you talk about 1000+ abbreviations, my mind boggles. That almost seems the opposite of the GTD philosophy, to needle you a bit. It’s 1000 more things you have to keep in memory, no matter how buried in reflex they get (and the more buried in reflex, the more frustrating and slowing when you don’t have them at hand).

Now, I do customize my environment, particularly with command line aliases, so I can’t claim purity on this point — but I do find after a certain point my own aliases become unmanageable, and with ones that are mainly to save me from typing woefully complicated lists of switches or some such, but infrequently actually used, I would end up having to double-check the syntax that I devised when I used them! I suspect the same would happen if I overdosed on a utility like this.

I just noticed (last Friday) that Firefox switched Ctrl-Y to be the Redo command (formerly it opened the Download Manager window). Lots to be said for not having to remember what works in what context.

I’ll leave off here for fear of dragging the thread into discussions of keyboards and security practices …

dansays: Actually, you can do this with the latest version of TypeIt4Me. It isn’t as elegant as the BBEdit solution, but it works. If you insert the string @$1C at the end of your text, the cursor will move back one character (@$1D for moving right). Just repeat the string 5 times if you want to move left 5 characters.

It’s true that Typeit4me acts sort of weird on occasion in OSX. It helps to define the app you’re working in as TSM-aware (in the Typeit4me preferences).

However, Riccardo says that he’s releasing a new version of Typeit4me for OSX within a couple of months - I hope this will clear up any inconsistencies.

I remember Typeit4me well from my OS9 days. When I used to do mass mailing labels for my church and other non-profits, it was a lifesaver. Type in a few letters and city, state, zips were filled in like a charm. Anyone who does extended amounts of typing doesn’t know what they’re missing if they haven’t given this app a try. If I did more writing myself I would certainly be using it.

This is just a systemwide ‘autocorrect’, isn’t it? (I use autocorrect extensively for MS Word). It requires an awful lot of customisation that you can’t carry around with you. For those of us who move around, it’s a hostage to fortune, it ties you down to one computer. And if your computer goes down…

Someone needs to reinvent the keyboard. Not just playing around with the layout (a la Dvorak, or even Maltron) but creating a whole section for common words. We all type ‘teh’ because there isn’t a key for ‘the’, for example.

Well, until they invent a key that stops me spelling my name “Melrin” about 40% of the time, I’m a happy hostage, Andrew. As far as “carrying it around” it works fine in most apps on my single PowerBook so I have no complaints there.

I agree that this app is far from perfect and like a lot of OS9 legacies, it could use an extreme Cocoa facelift (maybe Typeit4Me and BBEdit can make a day of it at the programming spa). But it does actually do more than autocorrect, per se. It also lets me store and explode customized strings and very long messages that I’ve wasted time retyping or pasting in the past. If I had my druthers this would act as a much less intrusive background app that used transparent regular expressions, like, say, Pith Helmet does. (I don’t now how TI4M does its thing.)

Still, it’s there and it works until the killer-er app comes along, you know? Does what it says on the tin, anyway.

Thanks for the review, I’m glad I found this little product.

I GTD using Tinderbox, and I was constantly typing in little timestamps. (Love Tinderbox, but it doesn’t have a native timestamp command). 30 seconds of setting TypeIt4Me up, and I’ve easily saved 15 minutes a week.

The other quick win was Amazon links. Defined “amzn” as the url string with my affiliate id embedded. Just switch the ASIN and go. Saves another few minutes a week.

How does it compare to Keyboard Maestro?

http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/

I’ve never used either but they’re both on the list of things to try Real Soon Now™

TextExtras by Mike Ferris is free and does word completions as well as a bunch of other stuff. You can define abbreviations, but TextExtras also scans what you’re writing so you don’t have to remember a long list of shortcuts. Only for Cocoa, though, so Tinderbox is not supported. There is similar functionality built in to TextEdit, too.

About TypeIt4Me asking you to restart after installing:

This is necessary. Don’t criticize the product or author for this. It’s necessary to at minimum log out and in again after updating an input method, but safest by far to restart.

See Apple’s Technical Q&A about this:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1054.html

Read the first section “Installing your input method for the first time” and the last “Writing an installer” and the note associated with Step 3 “Restart the computer.”.

This is the way it is, no getting around it. It’s no different when installing Spell Catcher’s input method component for the first time (or any other, for that matter). If you’re upgrading it, you can get away with a log out and in again almost all of the time, barring any corruption or invalid information in the com.apple.HIToolbox plist file in your home Library/Preferences/ByHost directory.

Evan Gross (Spell Catcher X author)

TypeIt4Me saved us tons of time on OS 9 (we’re a small translation company). Unfortunately, the OS X implementation is still very ropy - even at version 2. I have switched to SpellCatcher - not for spelling (which I turn off) but because it does what TypeIt4Me does (and imports your existing shortcuts) without dropping characters because you’re “typing too fast”. Also, with TypeIt4Me X, if you type an abb in an Excel cell and hit Tab to go to the next cell, you get the expansion in the next cell with the Abb still where you typed it. I thought the problems with TypeIt4Me were due to OS X (in fact, we stuck with OS 9 for nearly 2 years because we rely so much on TypeIt4Me for productivity ) but Spellcatcher works just like TypeIt4Me did on OS X - beautifully. I hope Riccardo can get TypeIt4Me back on the straight and narrow.

typeit4me sounds familiar

yeah…. i remember something like this - sounds like the mac came around to philippe kahn vintage 1985. turbo lightning and superkey? nahhhh….