- Category: Utility
- URL: http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/
- Company: Ergonis Software
- Price: $25
If you’re like me, you spend hours a day in e-mail. A lot of the e-mail I’m sending for Jackson Free Press says something similar—what our current advertising promotions are, what our upcoming issues are, and some boilerplate for answering questions from potential advertisers and readers. To deal with all of that, I rely on Typinator from Ergonis Software.
When active, Typinator sits in the background and watches for you to type certain letter combinations. On my Mac, when I type “upissues” all as one word, Typinator will replace that word with a long list of the upcoming issues of the Jackson Free Press and the topics planned for those issues. Likewise if I type “staffmail” as a single word, all of the e-mail addresses stored for my staff are pasted wherever I typed that — including in the To: or Bcc: entry box in Apple Mail or Gmail.
Typinator is also designed to enter the current date and time, and to autocorrect certain frequently mis-typed words, giving you a feature in any app that you’ll usually only find in word processor and some e-mail clients.
You can get really creative with Typinator, especially if you’re comfortable with AppleScript; Typinator also offers some pre-built sets of “snippets” to, for instance, making coding in HTML or working with FileMaker Pro move much more quickly.
My only major complaint is that Typinator doesn’t work with attachments, so when I’m sending e-mails with, say, a media kit that I’d like to attach, I do that part manually. It’d be nice if the attachment could come along for the ride. (Typinator can place images in your documents, but not items such as multi-page PDFs.)
Otherwise, I use it every day and find it works quick and comes in very handy in the background; there’s nothing like the feeling of not typing a long document over and over again when you’re trying to get a lot of e-mails or letters out in a short period of time. If you spend a little time thinking through what it can do for you I’ll bet you’ll find it’s a life-saver… or at least it saves a few keystrokes.
Rating: Recommended
Todd Stauffer 