TYPINATOR APPLESCRIPT WINDOWS
It's also extremely easy to share AppleScripts with colleagues who use Macs - a bit more elegant than, say, trying to share Perl scripts with Windows users who don't have Perl (and the required add-on modules) already installed. Another one reads a text document and inserts the article information into proper fields of our content management system, saving more cut-and-paste operations. Another script pulls data out of our Web analytics tool and formats it for our home page "popular right now" box.
This saves a boatload of tedious cutting and pasting. You can connect to network servers and even create a simple database.Īfter a few months on a Mac, I wrote a script that copies data from a weekly report I get as a PDF, and formats it for insertion into a spreadsheet. You can batch process files, rename and resize multiple images, or fetch Web pages and manipulate the results. You can use it to set your system to boot up with certain apps open in a particular way, right down to the size, location and content of each window.
Even Microsoft uses it, he says (for work on developing Office for Macintosh).īut AppleScript is also well suited for the desktop.
TYPINATOR APPLESCRIPT SOFTWARE
Soghoian estimates that four out of five "top-tier" Apple customers use AppleScript for serious automation - his examples include The New York Times generating daily stock charts and software developers testing applications. Typinator is also more limited than its competitors in its support for variables.AppleScript's appeal is that it can control both your operating system and your applications, easily passing information among them. Beyond date and time, you can insert the clipboard’s contents and position the cursor at a particular position in your expansion (useful when you need to type additional text after the expansion is pasted). But you can’t include special characters (Tab, Backspace, Return) or other abbreviations, you can’t run AppleScripts, and you can’t have the program pause for user input before it inserts the expanded text. Some other programs can do all of those things. You can, however, specify whether or not the case of text matters (so Ttt and ttt can be separate abbreviations). You can also make expansions follow the case you use when typing them: For example, you can types Btw when you want to insert By the way at the beginning of a sentence, and btw to put by the way in the middle. Typinator ships with a number of predefined abbreviations, each stored in its own set. For instance, there’s a set of 2,300 auto corrections from TidBITS that includes common typographical mistakes (such as producitve and indentify) that are more complex than the example I gave above. I found this set really valuable, as it covers a huge assortment of typos. Typinator also includes abbreviation sets for HTML code, FileMaker functions, superscripts and subscripts, and auto-correction libraries in a few additional languages.įor example, I have about 20 different shortcuts for typing various URLs. Instead of having to remember which shortcut I assigned to which expansion, I can type Control-Enter to activate Typinator’s Spotlight-like search box (which appears at the top center of the screen), then type either part of the abbreviation or some portion of the expansion-in this example, part of the URL I want to insert-and Typinator instantly shows a list of matches. If there’s only one match, I would just press Return to insert the text into the frontmost text area if there’s more than one, I can choose the desired expansion with the arrow keys, or type more text in the search box to further narrow the results. As someone with a large set of expansions, this feature makes it much simpler to find my seldom-used (but still important) ones.
TYPINATOR APPLESCRIPT MAC
If you use more than one Mac, Typinator can use either Dropbox or MobileMe to synchronize abbreviations from Mac to Mac. You can import abbreviations from TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, making it easy to move to Typinator. In use, I found Typinator expanded my abbreviations quickly, even when using a ridiculously-long example (the entire text of the Declaration of Independence). A long example, copied from Wikipedia, containing rich text and embedded images performed similarly well. The only thing I really missed was the capability to insert special characters in my abbreviations-very useful for filling out Web forms.
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