TextExpander

Developer: SmileOnMyMac, LLC
Category: Productivity
Version: 1.0
Release Date: August 15, 2009
Size: 0.3 MB
Price: $1.99 (until September 9)

After a year of the untamed wild west App Store, we're entering the phase where long-term Macintosh developers are finally starting to enter the iPhone game in force. This is a great development, with some caveats. The iPhone is not the Macintosh, and iTablet rumors aside, it's not likely to be anytime soon. But when a Mac developer who "gets it" starts developing for the iPhone, you should pay strict attention.

TextExpander is one of the Macintosh utilities I have come to depend on, like Quicksilver or Path Finder. On the Macintosh, TextExpander sits on top of your other applications and watches everything you type, looking for shortcuts you've programmed it to recognize. For example, I just typed "wwbr" and "With best regards" automatically popped up. You program Text Expander with your favorite, most often used phrases, paragraphs, even entire letters. With some practice, you can cut your "tedious writing" time in half.

Now, this has one huge benefit and one huge disadvantage as an iPhone application. We've all grown used to the iPhone keyboard by now, bit I don't think any of us love it. You can see the benefit immediately: imagine typing four letters and having an entire pre-programmed paragraph appear. Imagine cutting your thumb-typing in half, programming useful words and phrases into memory for texts, emails, tweets, blog posts...

And by now it's dawning on you what the huge disadvantage is, and it's a doozy. TextExpander needs to work as a background app on the Macintosh, monitoring other programs. The iPhone allows no background apps. So: on the iPhone, you have to do all of your typing in TextExpander, then cut and paste it into a program that actually sends and receives data. TextExpander tries to make this as easy and painless as possible, allowing you to port your text right into an email, a twitter client, or just copy and paste. But it's still an obstacle.

And it is no small obstacle. You actually have to retrain yourself to open TextExpander first, no matter whether you're sending an email, a text, or a tweet. For texts and tweets, it's almost certainly faster to type straight from the program itself. So TextExpander becomes an email/blogging aide, which is great if you're one of the geeks who uses his or her iPhone as a content management system. The rest of us...may not quite be there yet.

I have great expectations for this application in the future, and if Apple ever allows background apps to run on the iPhone, this should be an automatic, no-brain-required buy. Until then, it's an elegant work-around that almost solves a problem, and is worth it for people who do a lot of typing on their iPhone.