Over time I download and install many helpful utilities to my Mac. Some I completely forget about them and fall into the trap of believing that their behind-the-scenes benevolence is actually something built in to OS X.
Then comes the new computer, installed from scratch, and I realise little things don’t work the same. Sometimes, I cannot remember the name of the particular app and have to go trawling through the apps on the old computer until something jogs my memory. Others, such as Alfred, are frequently in my consciousness as I type, for instance, Control-Space-OF to launch Omni Focus instead of ploughing through the list of applications.
Most of these little applications I couldn’t now manage without. In this category comes Text Expander from Smile Software. This utility saves me hours of typing a year by recognising frequently used words and phrases, even whole paragraphs, and substituting the full text for a short abbreviation.
Harry Guinness at Tuts+ has written one of his very helpful tutorials on Text Expander and I would recommend reading his advice if you want to find out how to save time. As he says:
TextExpander is a productivity app that uses keyboard shortcuts to automatically insert longer blocks of frequently used text called snippets. For repetitive tasks that require entering the same information over and over again, it is an invaluable tool that can save a surprising amount of time.