I’ve had Text Expander loaded on my computer since back when I worked for Apple Inc. (about 4 years ago). One of the guys I worked with, Sunny, turned me on to it but I really never used it for more then inserting a mail signature or inserting the time and date. For those of you who have never used Text Expander, here is how Smile Software describes it.

“Save time and effort with TextExpander! Whether it’s a simple email signature or several paragraphs of a standard response, you’ll love how easy it is to use TextExpander to avoid typing the same thing over and over.”

A few days ago, I was reading an article on Net Tuts about coding faster and it got me thinking. Whenever I write a post on my blog, I prefer to use the html versus the visual editor. I use shortcodes all the time to format my posts, but sometimes I forget a shortcode or misspell things.

[note_box]A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line. Shortcode = shortcut.[/note_box]

In the past I have used a cheat sheet with all my shortcodes. Today I’m happy to announce I have trashed my cheat sheet and found my new favorite app for posting to my blog. Now when I want to insert an image in a post and add lightbox functionality, I just type “aephoto.” Text expander then changes “aephoto” to:

image small="http://someurl.com/images/small.jpg" big="http://someurl.com/images/big.jpg" align="center" width="650" height="250" type="image" skin="on"

Notice the urls in the shortcode above. Those were inserted because I commonly upload an image to my servers image folder and then copy the image url to my clip board. So, when I type in “aephoto,” Text Expander just takes the contents of my clipboard and inserts them into the snippet. Pretty handy!

To make my life much easier, I went through all my shortcodes and made Text Expander Snippets for each of them. I even made a snippet to create Lorem Ipsum text for when I need place holder text. I also love that the App has statistics built in to show you how much time you have saved.

[box style="note"]After using Text Expander for 7 days, I have saved 9,160 Characters[/box]

This brings up an interesting point… What other software have I dismissed because I had a preconceived notion of what it did?

Do you use Text Expander? Do you have any tips or snippets to share?
Aside from Text Expander, what’s the one time saving piece of software that you couldn’t live without?

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