••••••••••• ( updated on Wednesday, July 31, 1996 ) ••••••••••
What does TypeIt4Me do?
Anytime you enter text in your Mac by typing it at the keyboard, TypeIt4Me can help you do it faster and more accurately.
First you define a number of abbreviations and the full text entries that they represent, then you watch the Mac expand them on the fly even as you continue typing!
Abbreviations can represent any text you like, such as:
- a long, hard-to-type word like 'supercalifragilisticexpiralidosius' or 'benzo-methyl-tricarbo-something-or-other';
- your name and address;
- a standard end of letter salutation;
- an entire paragraph of legal or medical text;
- a short word that you often misspell (such as 'teh' instead of 'the');
- just about anything else you need to type often.
To trigger the automatic typing of the text represented by an abbreviation you can either:
• type the abbreviation
or
• select the abbreviation from TypeIt4Me's pop up menu.
For example, instead of typing my name in full, I simply type 're' and TypeIt4Me comes up with 'Riccardo Ettore'. (And, no, TypeIt4Me will not bother me when I type 'more' or 'read' or 'area', since it looks for the letters 're' as a separate word, i.e. preceded and followed by punctuation marks.)
Even if you already use your word processor's own glossary feature or a macro utility such as Quickeys or KeyQuencer, please give TypeIt4Me a try. You'll be surprised at how much easier it is to remember and type an abbreviation you make up, rather than having to memorize keyboard combinations such as control-shift-something-or-other.
Also, once you define an abbreviation, it is available at all times, anywhere text can be typed, no matter if you are using your word processor, paint program, Finder, address book or any application at all!
What can you use it for?
That depends on who you are and what you write about. Doctors, lawyers and professional writers are the three most prominent types of users who have bought a TypeIt4Me user licence so far.
In my own case, I find it extremely useful for typing the current date and my return address at the top of a letter and for my standard end of letter salutation, for which I type 'ys' and get:
Yours sincerely,
Riccardo Ettore.
Abbreviations don't have to be shorter than the text they type. For example, I have defined 'tilde' (5 letters long) to 'expand' to a single character ('~'), which I often need in C programs, yet always manages to disappear from the keyboard when I most need it!
By defining a set of mnemonic abbreviations for the most frequently used words, you can type faster yet more accurately with less effort. On page 387 of its May 1990 issue, MacWorld has this to say about a commercial program that does the same - at nearly twice the price: "inexpensive;saves keystrokes;has potential to help RSI sufferers".
For example, "u r rh ab teh cgs" could type out "you are right about the changes". (Assuming that you have defined u=you, r=are, rh=right, ab=about, teh=the and cgs=changes and that you defined the space bar as one of your expansion triggers.)
Another application of TypeIt4Me should become apparent if you look closely at the previous example:
Notice how the common mistake of typing "teh" instead of "the" gets automatically corrected as would "adn" for "and", plus any others that you can think of. So assuming, of course, that you create the appropriate entries first, TypeIt4Me can help you eliminate your most common typos on the fly.
You can also take advantage of the Edit entries… feature to use TypeIt4Me as a kind of scrapbook (for text only) which will pop up at any time (even when another application is displaying a modal dialog and won't let you access desk accessories).
TypeIt4Me is also very useful for entering repetitive data in a database file.
Naturally, you will probably find your own, novel uses for this program. If you can spare the time, I would definitely appreciate hearing how you use it and share your tips and hints with the other users.
What do the experts say about TypeIt4Me?
In its August 1992 issue, MacWorld called TypeIt4Me "indispensable" and a "truly wonderful shareware gizmo".
MacUser gave it the 1994 Shareware Award for Best Publishing Tool.
In their book Mac & PowerMac SECRETS, David Pogue & Joseph Schorr called it a "spectacular typing-shortcut utility" and "a blessing for anyone who uses the Mac for typing".
It also won America Online's "The MUT 1996 Shareware Awards" http://members.aol.com/macutility/mut_awards.html
Apple Fellow and Mac Evangelist Guy Kawasaki says: "Check it out. It's one of my favorite pieces of software--I use it to input all the keywords for EvangeList."
So why not try it out and see what you think of it.
Where and when does TypeIt4Me type?
The typing will occur wherever you are currently entering text, be it in a word processing document, a Finder Get Info box, a Save as… dialog, a folder or file name field, a database entry field and so on.
The text stored in one of the entries will be typed out for you either when you select its name (i.e. the abbreviation you have defined) from TypeIt4Me's pop up menu or when you type its name preceded and followed by any of 32 trigger characters. Using the Preferences… dialog, you will later be able to define exactly what characters should act as triggers.
The font and style of the text will be those currently applied to any text you may type yourself in your document, not the font and style that the entry text was in when you defined the entry.
Similarly, the location of the text will be affected by the current ruler settings in your document.
However, if your word-processor accepts keyboard commands to turn attributes such as bold and italics on/off, you can embed them in the entry text. This is done by typing two consecutive "@" characters plus the letter that corresponds to the menu command. For example, if you wanted the word "great" to come out in bold in the sentence "this is great!", you could define an abbreviation whose entry would look like this:
this is @@bgreat@@b!
The first "@@b" will issue a command-b, causing the word great to appear in bold, the second "@@b" issues another command-b to turn bold off (otherwise all further typing would also come out in bold).
Just make sure you don't trigger this abbreviation in a program that interprets a command-b as a request to delete all your work and start World War III <grin>!!!
New in 4.6:Typing @^ instead of @@ will cause the shift key to be "pressed" as well. Also, @$ will let you type the Hex code for a character to be typed. E.g.: @$08 would "type" a backspace.
NB
Remember that anything you type on the keyboard will replace whatever text is currently selected in the frontmost window. Since TypeIt4Me simulates your typing, don't be surprised to see a disk or a file icon renamed if they are selected in the Finder when you have TypeIt4Me start typing something.
Simply clicking the mouse button will immediately cause TypeIt4Me to stop typing.
Finally, you may notice a slower display of the characters you type. This is due to TypeIt4Me doing very frequent accesses to its data file on disk. It will be more noticeable with slower and/or fragmented hard disks.
Vital Statistics
How many different data files can you have?
As many as you care to define and will fit on your disk.
How many entries can be added to each file?
A little over 2,700. However, a large number of entries will tend to slow things down a little and bringing up the Edit entries… dialog will take a fairly long time.
How long can an entry name (i.e. an abbreviation) be?
Entry names should not exceed 50 characters. Also, if you later want an entry to expand automatically as you type its name, make sure the entry name does not contain any of the trigger characters (as chosen by you via the Preferences… dialog).
TypeIt4Me is Shareware
(Here comes the commercial part <grin>)
TypeIt4Me is NOT a free or public domain program. It's just as "commercial" as any program distributed through "traditional" channels you may have bought from a dealer. The main difference is that it's distributed on a "try before you buy" basis, generally referred to as "shareware". What this means is that not only it's not copy-protected, but you are actually urged to give copies to your friends. The only restrictions are that this text must always accompany the program and that you cannot modify it in any way, sell it, or include it on a disk which is sold without my prior written consent (this also applies to PD distribution outfits such as, but not limited to, BudgetBytes, MacClub Benelux, Educorp et al.).
By avoiding the overhead of advertising and dealer margins, shareware authors can still make a fair profit while asking users for a lot less than what their programs would be priced at, were they to be distributed via commercial channels.
I sincerely hope you'll find TypeIt4Me useful as an aid to increased productivity.
If you don't, just throw it away and you'll owe me nothing (or better still, tell me what would make it useful to you and worth paying for and I'll see what I can do to satisfy you).
If you do, and therefore decide to keep it in your software collection, I ask that you abide by the shareware code of honour and pay for it. The licence fee is a very modest US$30 and I’ll acknowledge your payment by sending you a disk crammed with the latest version of this program and as many of my other shareware and freeware programs as will fit on it. Sending me your registration fee will also ensure that I keep improving this program (possibly implementing one of your own suggestions) and write other reasonably priced utilities. I have been improving and supporting TypeIt4Me for about seven years, mainly thanks to the many people who have encouraged me to do so by registering their use of it.
If you like what I write in my very limited spare time, imagine what I could come up with, if your payments supported me full time…
Thank you in advance for keeping the shareware spirit alive!
Installing TypeIt4Me
TypeIt4Me is a Control Panel (often referred to as cdev in MacSpeak)
To install it, you:
1) drag its icon to your System Folder and drop it (answering OK when System 7 asks you for permission automatically to place it in the Control Panels folder)
and
2) restart the Mac.
If all goes well, you should see a new small icon in the menu bar, just left of the Apple Menu.
If you already use such popular extensions as PopChar or NowMenus (like I do), you are probably concerned that TypeIt4Me's icon in the menu bar will conflict with theirs. Rest assured that although the icons will overlap, TypeIt4Me leaves enough free room above its own icon for you to activate either of the other two.
However, for your convenience, TypeIt4Me's icon can also be moved to any other position along the menu bar (simply press the command key and drag the icon along) or removed from it entirely, if you prefer (via options in the Preferences dialog).
The following sections explain in detail the use and functionality of each item of the menu that pops up when you click on TypeIt4Me's icon.
How do you use it?
The very first thing to do after you've installed TypeIt4Me is to create a new file for its entries. Click on the TypeIt4Me icon and you'll be presented with the following menu:
Notice that the last item says "No data file open". This is because you haven't yet opened the file containing the abbreviations and what they should expand to.
If this is the first time you've ever used TypeIt4Me, your only choice for now is to select New file… since there won't be any TypeIt4Me files on your hard drive to open.
The dialog that follows your choice of New file… is the familiar Save as… dialog.
If you don't like the default name for the new file ("TypeIt4Me data") you can naturally change it to your liking, just as you can change the folder in which the file should be created. I would recommend to store this file in a folder where you keep documents you have created so that it will get backed up in the same way as all other original documents on your drive when you copy that folder to your backup disk(s).
Now that you have created a file to store your entries in, you need to start creating the entries themselves.
There are two ways of creating an entry: one involves using your favourite word processor, the other is to use the Edit entries… function of TypeIt4Me.
Let's have a look at each in turn:
1) Creating an entry via
Add an entry
Suppose you often close your letters with the words Yours Sincerely. It would be quite easy to remember the abbreviation ys to stand for Yours Sincerely, wouldn't it? Well, to add this entry to the TypeIt4Me file, you would:
- type Yours Sincerely one last time in your word processor
- select the text and either cut or copy it to the clipboard
- select Add an entry from TypeIt4Me's menu.
At this point, you'll be prompted to name this new abbreviation:
As you can see in the picture above, TypeIt4Me will suggest that you use the first four letters of the text in the clipboard as your abbreviation. Although this might sometimes be appropriate, we decided this abbreviation would be called ys, so that's what we'll type now:
Click OK now and your first abbreviation will be added to the current file of entries. From now on, every time you type ys TypeIt4Me will backspace over the abbreviation (ys) and type the full text for you (Yours Sincerely).
2) Creating an entry via
Edit entries…
Select Edit entries… from the pop up menu (or via a hot key of your choice). You'll get the following dialog:
The picture above shows that I have already defined 10 entries. The entries are listed in alphabetical order on the left. Clicking on one causes the text it represents to appear in the editable field on the right. To create the Yours Sincerely abbreviation via this dialog, you would:
- click on the New button
- type ys as the name of the abbreviation
- click in the right hand side pane of the dialog and type Yours Sincerely
- click Save (or press Enter) to confirm your choice.
If you wish, you can now create more entries by repeating the above procedure. When you have finished, click Done (the Cancel button gets renamed to Done as soon as you have edited an entry, to indicate that you have accomplished something that will not be undone when you dismiss this dialog).
That's it, you have already learnt most of what you need to know to make good use of TypeIt4Me.
The Preferences… dialog
Many of TypeIt4Me's features can be fine tuned to your own personal taste and requirements. This is accomplished via the Preferences… dialog:
The four buttons in this dialog will present you with as many sub dialogs as described below.
Hot Keys…
Instead of reaching for the menu every time you want to accomplish certain tasks you can define a keyboard combination that will immediately invoke the desired function. To do this, you call up the Hot Keys dialog via the corresponding button in the Preferences. Here's what it looks like:
The word <none> next to a function name indicates that no hot key is assigned to it. To assign one, click on the square facing the action of your choice (or use Tab to reach it instead of clicking it, if you prefer) then type the hot key you desire. Hot keys must include at least one of either the control, option or command keys and can only be a letter from A to Z (upper and lower case are distinguished). To revert to having no hot key assigned to an action, press the backspace (delete) key.
In the example picture above, ctrl-a is assigned to invoke Add an entry.
Date/time…
Before you even begin to define your own personalized entries, TypeIt4Me "knows" how to type the current date and/or time of day. Simply pop up the TypeIt4Me menu and select the date or time from either the Sys(tem) Date&Time or Alt(ernate) Date&Time menu. The latter menu will initially show (and type) the US format, but without the name of the day of the week in the long date, as requested by several users. A little ResEdit work will soon have you customize the Alt Date&Time menu to your own specifications. If you don't know what ResEdit is or have never used it, I'm afraid this help file is not even going to attempt to teach you about it. Several articles and books on ResEdit have been published to date and you should refer to them. The Alternate date formats are stored in the TypeIt4Me file as resource 'INTL', ID=1.
The Sys and Alt Date&Time can also be invoked by typing one of nine abbreviations which you can define by choosing the Preferences… menu item and then clicking the Date/time… button, which brings up the following dialog:
The abbreviations on the left (dts,dtl, etc.) are just suggestions and you can naturally replace them with whatever makes more sense to you.
Expansion…
This part of the preferences dialog allows you to choose one, several or indeed all of 32 different punctuation characters that will act as triggers and cause your abbreviations to be expanded as you type. To add/delete a trigger, just place/remove the check mark next to it. The following picture shows the default setting of tab, space, hard space (generated with option+space) and return. Use the All or None buttons to quickly select or deselect all check boxes.
Let's look at the other check boxes:
Disable automatic expansion should be quite self-explanatory: if you check it, TypeIt4Me will no longer expand your entries automatically as you type.
Don't append trigger: check this one if you don't want the character that triggered the expansion to be appended at the end of the expanded entry.
Case sensitive expansion: if you check this option, you will have to type the abbreviation in exactly the same case as it was defined in or it won't be expanded. However, TypeIt4Me will not allow you to define two identical abbreviations, even if you type them in a different case. So, if "abb" exists, you cannot also define "Abb" or "ABB".
Ignore caps lock: this turns off the feature whereby the entry is typed in ALL CAPS if the CAPS LOCK key is engaged when you type the abbreviation or if you type the abbreviation in ALL CAPS (using shift).
Expand via Clipboard: this will copy the entry text to the Clipboard (thus overwriting any previous contents!) and issue a Paste command. The text will thus appear much faster than when it gets typed one letter at a time, but this method may not work in some programs, which is why it's presented as an option.
Menu…
TypeIt4Me can also pop its menu up anywhere you click on the screen if you simultaneously hold down a combination of one or more of the four so-called "modifier" keys, that is, Shift, Control, Option and Command.
To determine which combination of keys will cause the menu to pop up anywhere you click, check the boxes next to the key(s) you wish to use.
Hide menu bar "hot spot" icon
If you'd rather not see TypeIt4Me's small icon in the menu bar, check this box. Unless you also check the disable menubar "hot spot" check box, clicking on the invisible icon will still pop up the menu. If you check both boxes and have not defined a pop up key combination, you will only be able to access TypeIt4Me by changing the Prefs via the Control Panel.
Put icon on right
If you'd rather have TypeIt4Me pop up when you click in the right-hand corner of the screen instead of the left, just check this.
Note that you can also place the icon anywhere at all in the menu bar area by pressing the command key and dragging the icon along. I often place mine between the balloon help and application list icons, like this:
Don't append abbs to menu: this is to avoid an extremely long delay when popping up the menu if the file contains hundreds of entries.
Type Clipboard
This is useful in cases where you have some text in the Clipboard and you cannot use the Paste command.
New File & Open File…
TypeIt4Me stores its entries in one or more files which you can name as you like and store anywhere you want on your hard disk.
Use New file… to create a new file for storing your entries.
Use Open file… any time you want to switch from one set of entries to another.
Printing a list of your entries
Use the Export… button in the Edit entries… dialog to create a text file containing all the entries defined in the current TypeIt4Me file. You can then open this file with your favourite word processor and print it. (You can also edit this file and turn it back into a TypeIt4Me file using the accessory application Text2Type.)
Text2Type
Text2Type is a very quick and dirty utility that will take a text file as input and produce a TypeIt4Me data file as output. You should have received it from the same source where you got TypeIt4Me from (the two should only be distributed together in a single compressed file).
Text2Type performs very little checking on the structure of the input file, so it's really up to you to make sure you respect it.
The best way to be acquainted with the structure is to use the Export… feature of TypeIt4Me to create a sample text file.
For example, if your TypeIt4Me data file contains two abbreviations that expand to
TypeIt4Me (ty)
and
Yours Sincerely (ys)
then the text file generated by clicking Export… in the Edit entries… dialog will contain the following text:
ty• TypeIt4Me••
ys• Yours Sincerely••
In other words, you get the abbreviation name plus one bullet (•) followed by a tab followed by the text the abbreviation expands to (i.e. the entry text) plus two bullets (••) followed by a carriage return.
So long as you respect this syntax, you can edit, remove or add entries to this text file and then use Text2Type to convert it back to the resource file format used by TypeIt4Me.
Under system 7, simply drop the file to be converted on the Text2Type icon. If you are still running system 6, select both the file and Text2Type (in order to do that they obviously have to be in the same folder) and either double click on one of them or select Open from the Finder file menu.
Disabling automatic expansion
If you ever want to stop an entry while it's being typed, simply click the mouse.
If you don't want an abbreviation to be expanded, type a space while holding down the shift key.
Whenever you wish to temporarily turn off TypeIt4Me's automatic expansion of abbreviations, you can type the hot key you have selected for this function in the Preferences dialog. Pressing the hot key again will turn it back on. Notice that the icon in the menu bar will turn gray/black to reflect the off/on status of automatic expansion. You can also achieve the same result by clicking on the TypeIt4Me icon in the menu bar while pressing the option key.
If you want to permanently turn it off (even across system restarts, that is) you can check the Disable automatic keyboard expansion box in the Preferences… menu item.
Compatibility Issues
System 7.5
Apple's installer will move TypeIt4Me to a folder marked "May Not Work With System 7.5". Just place TypeIt4Me back in the Control Panels folder: TypeIt4Me works as happily under 7.5 as under previous system versions.
Ragtime
For TypeIt4Me to work properly, Ragtime's automatic hyphenation option must be turned off (in the Preferences dialog). This is because Ragtime automatically inserts a special character in the places where the word you're typing can be hyphenated (you can see that, by selecting show invisible characters in Ragtime). When TypeIt4Me issues the necessary number of backspace codes to erase the abbreviation before typing out its expanded text, it obviously doesn't know that Ragtime has inserted these characters "behind its back" and ends up erasing only part of the abbreviation.
Stepping Out II
To avoid problems, rename TypeIt4Me so it loads before Stepping Out (any alphabetically lower name will do, such as aTypeIt4Me ).
TypeIt4Me displays a cross over its icon at startup
Some users have reported that TypeIt4Me displays a cross on its icon at startup and won't load. The most likely reason for this behaviour is that it was denied the (small) amount of system heap memory it requires. Try renaming TypeIt4Me in such a way as to cause it to load at a different point (say before all other INITs or at the very end or somewhere in between) and see if that helps.
Quickeys
To avoid losing the first character typed after an abbreviation (seems to happen under MS Word only), make sure TypeIt4Me loads after Quickeys.
ProSwitch should be made to load after TypeIt4Me.
Greg's Buttons (which I love and have paid for) seems to cause crashes on some Mac models when checking the options in TypeIt4Me's Preferences… dialog. I'm not sure if there's a work around this problem.
Billminder also reportedly causes TypeIt4Me to crash.
Norton FileSaver reportedly causes the TypeIt4Me icon to disappear from the menu bar. This is not dangerous and TypeIt4Me continues to function normally.
Framemaker 4.0 will crash if an abbreviation types more than 254 characters.
Safe as houses?
If you've read the notes accompanying my other shareware programs, you'll know that I am always very careful about giving any guarantees and assurances.
In the case of this program, I feel fairly confident (though you'll never find me categorical) about claiming that it's safe to use.
Not only I, but a fair number of friends and colleagues have been using successive versions of TypeIt4Me since July 1989 on all sorts of different Mac configurations and it has so far peacefully co-exhisted (bar a few exceptions listed above) with the multitude of extensions (INITs) and control panels (cdevs) that take turns at populating and occasionally conflicting in our system folders (I have been known to startup with over THIRTY different INITs and cdevs, but I usually restrict myself to a mere dozen or so).
Get this straight, I'm not claiming it's totally bug-free (God knows I've fixed many in the last few years!) or that it won't have a problem in your own environment. I'm just saying that I feel safe in recommending that you try it out and see if it can save you time and effort while you type.
So please try TypeIt4Me out on your particular system and let me know how it performs. A fair number of people are obviously satisfied with TypeIt4Me or they wouldn't have paid their registration fee.
One thing is for sure: I will definitely continue to support and improve this program (as I have indeed done for the past seven years), since I for one could not do without it.
Here's hoping that you too will want to make it a permanent denizen of your System Folder.
Standard Disclaimer
Use this program at your own risk. I make no warranties either express or implied as to its performance on your particular system. I will not be held responsible for any data loss or other damages incurred through its use.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Guy, Paul, Knud, Giuseppe, Massimo, Diego, Jeremy, Denis, Andre, Ansfried, Benny, Sergio & JBQ for the trust and courage with which they've opened their System Folders to early versions of this program.
A special thank you to Guy Fiems and Pascal Pochet, who once again provided me with invaluable debugging help!
And many thanks to James W. Walker for creating the code that makes it so easy to display this help text.
System Requirements
TypeIt4Me is fully compatible with System 7.x. Although it might still work fine with systems as old as 4.1, I must admit that I no longer take the time to do extensive testing on any system older than 7.5.3.
OK, OK, How Do I Register?
To register, you may wish to print out the following text, but even sending a scrap of paper with your name and address on it will do (just don't forget to include the cheque or credit card info):
Air Mail this form to:
Riccardo Ettore,
Attn. TypeIt4Me,
37 Winn Road
London, SE12 9EX, UK
(if paying by credit card, you may also fax it to +44 181 857 1372 or Email it to Compuserve 72277,1344 or INTERNET:72277.1344@compuserve.com)
……………………………………… CUT HERE ………………………………………
TypeIt4Me Registration Form
I wish to become a registered user: apart from feeling that I've "done the right thing", I'll also get a disk with the latest version of this and your other shareware programs and written notification should you further upgrade the program.
_ I'm enclosing a US check for $30
_ I'm enclosing a UK cheque for £20
_ I'm enclosing a Eurocheque in BELGIAN Francs (BFr) for the equivalent of US$30
(eurocheques MUST be in BFr to avoid huge bank charges)
_ Charge the BFr equivalent of US$30 to my VISA/MasterCard/AmericanExpress
(You may/may not* give my address to other software/hardware vendors)
My Mac model is:____________________ running system version: ______
(I got TypeIt4Me V4.6 from (please circle or fill in as appropriate): R.Ettore's Web Page / Compuserve / ZiffNet / AOL / AppleLink / BBS: _______ / Internet:__________/ Friend: _______ /
