Automate Text Expansion - Take Control of Automating Your Mac (1.0) - page 49

• Include the contents of the clipboard in the expanded text
• Perform simple calculations on numbers and dates, including variables
• Reposition the insertion point to any arbitrary location after expanding text
• Use abbreviations to trigger AppleScripts
• Sync clippings and abbreviations via Dropbox
These four utilities are much more alike than different, and most users should be equally
content with any of them. I will, however, point out a few distinguishing characteristics:
• aText: aText strikes me as having the least-polished interface of the four
utilities—it doesn't even include online help or any other documentation—but
what it lacks in looks it makes up for in an extensive feature set. Among other
things, snippets can include editable fields, and can launch shell scripts as well
as AppleScripts. aText is also the least expensive option, at $5.
• TextExpander: Like aText, TextExpander has editable fields for
fill-in-the-blanks snippets. It also includes some spiffy predefined shortcuts,
such as one that uses AppleScript to shorten any URL on your clipboard with
a service such as bitly.com or is.gd. And, there's even an iOS version
( TextExpander touch ), which can sync snippets with the Mac version.
TextExpander also has the distinction of being the only item in this list with its
very own Take Control book—Michael Cohen's Take Control of TextExpander !
And we've included a coupon at the end of the topic for a 30-percent discount
on TextExpander.
• Typinator: Typinator , from the developer of KeyCue (discussed earlier) is
right up there on the feature comparison checklist, including fill-in-the-blanks
snippets, date and time calculations, and scripting support, among dozens of
other capabilities. You can download a free AppleScript snippet that performs
currency conversions—a neat trick. As of version 6, Typinator also supports
regular expressions, which means that expansions can be triggered with
user-defined patterns, not just fixed abbreviations—and the replacements can
also be pattern-based. However, unlike the other apps in this list, Typinator
doesn't let you define which delimiters trigger expansion—abbreviations can
expand either as soon as you're finished typing them or at word boundaries,
but you can't specify which characters signal the end of a word. And unlike
TextExpander and TypeIt4Me, it currently has no iOS counterpart. At the end
of this topic, there is a 30-percent-off coupon for Typinator.