Productivity with less typing


In this age when we type most of our stuff, be it emails, documents, code, letters, and so on. One thing that might have struck everyone would have been the fact that we end up typing a whole lot of redundant stuff. If we have signatures setup in emails, that's fine, but what about if we wanted to write some letters with a few changes, copy paste you say?
From Ergonis Software ( http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/ ) comes a wonderful product Typinator. Now there are a lot of software that function similar to this.

For the purpose of this review, we shall try to look at the software from the eyes of three roles, a developer, a HTML Developer and an office assistant. Three very common roles that any one of us could be performing, I am a developer and have to tinkle with a bit of HTML and then of course, write reviews, make proposals to clients, continue to write my book, etc.

So, as a developer I use software like Code Collector Pro and Schnippselchen Pro and CodeMonkey to manage code blocks and these do a good job at it, but when I am typing some sample code to demonstrate in a workshop or for a screencast video, I need code completion, xcode does a good job at code completion, but sometimes when alternative editors are used, code completion might not be a very viable option.

As a HTML developer, either while writing a quick HTML help file or working on portions of the website to add/change using the cpanel is not exactly fun, or while writing an entry for the blog, a quick fix dose of HTML is required. It is kind of difficult trying to create the html tags and keeping track of the same. And Blogger is a bit too pedantic about testing the tags, so it had really made life difficult for this review with so many <.

In regards to the office stuff, correspondences require a sort of a template and a structure, in the reviews, there are sections that are kind of templates which are used again. Let's see what typinator does, typinator is a text expander. So what it does is it sees that I have typed a word like "wbr" and then it will expand that to the appropriate text as required, which could be
cheers,

Jayant C Varma
OZ Apps
http://www.oz-apps.com
twitter : @ozapps

ReviewMe
http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
reviewme@oz-apps.com
twitter: @whatsin4me

and typing all of that without errors every time in just three keystrokes is amazing.

If you have been working on computers for a while, and have used Microsoft Word and seen that everytime you type "teh" it gets corrected to "the". That is the Autocorrect feature in MS Word, but that is exactly what an Text Expander software does.

Typinator has libraries, or what they call abbreviation sets. These sets can be loaded, can be activated or de-activated and even the applications that should work with these can be set so as to avoid text expansion in other software that could cause issues.

Typinator ships with some predefined sets that include Auto correct for French, German, British English (Thank god for that), US English, it also includes HTML snippets, File Maker functions, Subscripts and Superscripts. Personal sets can be created that can house the text that needs to be expanded and the triggering keywords.

Typinator can be paused temporarily and it also monitors other applications and plays well with them, when Parallels was running, typinator had a big red cross across it's icon in the menu bar indicating that it did not like working with parallels or could not expand text inside of the guest OS.

When it is on some password fields, it stops and looks like a robot with two eyes, actually black circles indicating a password field.

In terms of HTML development, tagging is a bit difficult, so typinator has a really cool feature, just type in the <<html and it will get expanded to "<html>\n</html>" in fact they have made it easy, so any html/xml tag can be created by just typing the << before the tag name.

The list of advanced functionality in typinator is just so amazing. With the minimal tweaking, right out of the box, typinator works fine. If the advanced settings can be tweaked, typinator opens up a whole new avenue of amazing text expansions. Create sets which indicate that each of the text shall have a preceding text signature, like in the case of the HTML, it is <<

Apart from text, typinator can expand formatted text and pictures, so in the role of office correspondence a logo is required to be inserted into a document, it is as simple as setting an abbreviation mylogo that could expand into the graphic.

Advanced formatting can be used with control over the cursor position and clipboard data in addition to the standard expansions of day, month, year in various formats.

We got a chance to try this out for over a whole month now and we have seen some of the issues that we faced with the operations, so we had to write to support, and we got a chance to see how quick and efficient support is and the resolution to the issues. The service and the quality of the responses are amazing.

Given the price and the things that typinator can achieve, we feel that it is best option amongst the offerings available in the Mac OS X marketplace.


SCREENSHOTS




SUMMARY
Software : Typinator
Version : 4.3
Publisher : Ergonis
Website : http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/
Twitter : @ergonis
Platform : Mac OS X (10.4 or higher)
Demo : 14 days
Price : € 19.99

And we have a copy of Typinator for one lucky winner, all you need to do
1. Follow @whatsin4me
2. Retweet the message "Read reviewme.oz-apps.com, follow @whatsin4me and RT this msg. You might win a copy of #Typinator from #Ergonis"

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