![]() The sheer volume of emails would suggest that the only sane way to handle them is simply to delete the ones that don’t interest me – but this creates its own problem. The majority of these are either not remotely relevant to me, or simply insufficiently interesting to cover. I mentioned last time a professional application.Īs a tech writer, I get a lot of PR companies emailing me with details of new products and services they’d like me to feature. You can use a specific trigger, which defaults to the tab key in PhraseExpress, but I find the double-period approach faster. The latter is to guard against accidental triggering. for address, the initials of our building) Cannot be inadvertently activated in normal typing.I wanted macro shortcuts to meet three criteria: Now I type four characters and the whole thing unfurls.įour characters, by the way, is a deliberate choice on my part. I include directions for public transit, cycling and driving, and the whole thing amounts to seven paragraphs. An example is giving visitors our address and directions. Many of us will need to send the same text relatively frequently. So when I spotted PhraseExpress, a Mac app which works in the same way as TextExpander but is free for personal use, or offers a one-off cost for commercial use, it seemed worth taking a look. In practice, that’s of limited value as iOS doesn’t support the macros, so the best you can do on an iPhone or iPad is to open the app and manually copy and paste the text. In principle, TextExpander gives you something worthwhile in return for the subscription: cloud storage of all your macros (‘snippets’ in TextExpander terminology) so you can access them on any device. On the other, multiple app subscriptions can easily stack up to a hefty annual amount … On the one hand, I do appreciate that recurring revenue is good for app developers, and increases the likelihood that an app will continue to be supported and improved. TextExpander has been a game-changer for me, but it’s a subscription app, something about which I have mixed feelings. You type a macro shortcut of your choice, and the app replaces it with a full block of text – with can be multiple paragraphs. Both apps can be thought of as autocorrect on steroids. Rather than do an expensive upgrade, I am hoping Snagit will do the same, as it can record videos.Īnd that’s it.PhraseExpress is a Mac app that does the same thing as TextExpander, which I reviewed back in 2017. ![]() But when I need to use it, it’s brilliant. ![]() Probably the most expensive software on this list, I only use it occasionally and it is a slightly out of date version. Screenflow - a screen cast recording piece of software. In conjunction with Google Calendar, and my omnifocus "completed list" usually means i can recall with a degree of precision what happened on a particular day! One time fee as well, no subscription □ĭayOne - a diary/journalling app, i usually jot down a paragraph about the days ups and downs to help with mental health. Anything new gets put in here and syncs everywhere. All of our goto recipes, a few dozen, are on here for quick reference. It’s very clever at scraping recipes off sites to download. I am amazed how much we as a family use this app. Mindnode - clever tool to draw mind maps when I am thinking about ideas, gret for mining your associative memory. I have an account on Inoreader that aggregates and organises the feeds (and has a nice web interface) but the mac, ipad and ios reeder apps work very well offline for quite reading. Reeder - slick RSS reader, I have dozens of technical feeds from AWS, Microsoft I skim read via this, it's miles easier than trying to follow single threads and tweets. Some even end up in client presentations. I can do this on my ipad with a pencil and can send them to the Macbook. GoodNotes - as several folks will tell you at at my office, I love scribbling notes and drawing ideas out as visuals. Tweetbot - easy Twitter client - I don’t post much but do read it. It does look good and is considered best in class, I might wait for an app store sale! Other More General AppsĪnd finally, here is a bonus list of more general Apps I use (some only on my personal mac!) Essentially, this tool does a screenshot (which is perfectly do-able with built in mac functionality) but the editing of the image - adding arrows, highlights, callouts, cropping etc, plus the management of the images is where this tool shines. I used to use Skitch for this, but I’m moving away from Evernote and the two are tightly coupled. It basically does screenshot and small video clip capture. I don’t mind paying small devs for good tools, but this one did feel a bit steep, but I use tools like this almost every day at some point.
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