I'm glad to see this. Once you get into shortcuts, you will start shortcutting everything, from dates (Saturday, September 17, 2005 at 4:20 PM, Colorado Time was just typed by hitting Command-9) to 5-line addresses, to entire 400-word boilerplate email responses, to the entire URLs of your favorite sites (especially the ones buried deep in 5 subdirectories). You would never remember them, but with a shortcut like forum.com, your specific forum's site comes up in under a second. Have a European phone number you can never remember? Just create a short cut, ElizPhone, and her entire 17-digit number appears anywhere you can place a cursor.

Like Hannu, I've used SpellCatcher since the late 90s. I've always thought it was an unfortunate name; while it does have a killer system-wide spell checker and alternative word window (see http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/sequoia1234/spellcatcher.png for an example of its drop down window that appears—you hit the corresponding number to replace the misspelled word), it's main strength is its ability to create thousands of shortcuts.

It's third feature, just so you know, is its "GhostWriter", which tracks every single keystroke you type, and then categorizes them by application into a text file. While many don't turn this on, for the (valid) fear of exposure, I love it. I've written long letters on Safari, and then had it crash. Or thought I sent an email, or overwritten something important in InDesign. Now, no problem: I open up that day's file of ghostwriter, and all the text is there.

I'm mentioning all this not to take away from what sounds like a very cool freeware app that does what SpellCatcher does. I'm verifying how instrumental shortcutting can become once you install one of these utilities. I could give 400 examples of where I use short cuts throughout my writing day. Get it and try it!

Scott