Recently, I posted about my thoughts on Text Expander after they announced that they were going to be moving to a subscription. And I got some feedback regarding what I wrote. I've pasted it below because I honestly don't get any feed back regarding any of my writingMost likely because I do not have comments on the site.
- I completely agree that they have kind of boxed themselves out of the "casual user" market and are now more focused on "power users" or those that are using this tool on multiple devices (like me)
- I think your point is very well written, but would love to see more information about the alternative (AutoHotKey) that you have selected.
- Perhaps it would be helpful to mention a couple of things (If any) that could make textexpander that tool for you again.
Great job though. You can definitely tell that you care about the company.
It's just they don't fit in your system anymore (which happens)
I like feedback. At this point, good or bad I'm happy with the fact that someone else is reading and it gives me some motivation to make the writing better. In this case, I'd like to further expand on the last two points in the reverse order.
3. How to make the tool more helpful for me
This is actually a something that needs to happen on my endTo be fair, the application tries its best to help me be as productive as possible.. The people at smile give you a number of examples that you can use right away to save you time.
The application does help in one major way everyday (when I do use it). Most mornings, I do use it to create my grateful journal template1. Here is a brief example of the template that I use:
# Things I'm Grateful for #
+
# Things I'm Excited about #
+
# One Thing I'd like to focus on #
By default, the application will monitor what you type and suggest even more snippets that you can add to your collection.
Maybe, I shouldn't have freaked out when I saw this feature pop up and you can always change the way it works in the preference because it could have been helpful. But it seemed creepy and annoying.
If you're feeling adventurous you can even go to the website of one of my heroes Brett Terpstra and check out his page of text expander tools.
Despite all this, I still find that I wasn't using it to the fullest
This was my last usage stat. Take it with a HUGE grain of salt because I only have it on my laptop and I do frequent re-installs. Ultimately, we all have to balance what we want versus what we need the money to go to.
2. AutoHotKey
On this topic, I don't have much to say because I no longer have a windows machine to use on a day to day basis. The great thing about this tool was that I was using it to now only fire off extensions but to launch applications and replicate user interactions for testing.
I would often use a keyboard short cut to launch the vnc client because the laptop that was given to employees to use might not be that powerful or we wanted to run a test on another machine that had a faster connection.
For user interactions, I created a script that would type in the keyboard shortcut that would make windows rotate the screen or do a series of mouse clicks to reproduce... something...
1. Updated...
While I was writing this, Smile reduced the price to $20 a year for the software. Which changes the deal significantly. Now I have to think about what the software is going to do for me going forward. Is this going to save me time in the future? Will I save more time than the time that I used writing about it here?
I don't know.
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It's an exercise that I do in the morning when I feel a little overwhelmed with life. I'm making it a habit and automating the prompt helps. Although, I do use Keyboard Meastro to do something similar. ↩