When I was using my iPad Pro nearly full time I was surprised by how few apps these days have TextExpander support. It used to be (or seemed to be) that no text editor on iOS would think about not offering it. Now it seems there are very few.
I have a full analysis that I did earlier this year showing how dreadfully TextExpander has been updated since it went to subscription. I went through and looked at their release notes before and after subscription.
Eventually I decided that it really served no purpose to write as an article. Anyone who is using their apps certainly knows how often they are(n’t) updated. Anyone who isn’t but who hates subscriptions would just use it as fodder for their argument, when really, at the end of the day it’s just one data point of a poorly done transition to subscription.
Well, poorly done from the user’s perspective at least… I would have to guess that the company itself must be doing fine financially. They still regularly sponsor websites and podcasts.
I’m guessing they have a sufficient number of big corporate clients who are happy to pay them as long as the app continues to work as it has before and who aren’t clamoring for new features.
I make heavy use of Typinator on the Mac. I find it every bit as good as TextExpander was.
After facing iPad woes today with email, no multi window on some apps and of course no TE in a lot of places, it makes me itch for an ARM MacBook that would offer me all the apps I know and love while being mobile. I increasingly find iPadOS to be a fine toy but that’s not where the real power is.
I did the same investigation and started to get steamed. So I just closed the lid of my mac, and backed away quietly.
I have not tried Typinator, does it offer something comparable to the Fill-In snippets that I adore? I think if it gets bad enough to where I drop the subscription (i.e. losing omnifocus, fantastical, or drafts support in iOS), I would just return to the pre-sub version of TE which I have read still works in Big Sur.
Yes I agree @Rob_Polding. The inbuilt text replacement on Mac and IOS syncs via iCloud and (in my case at least) does a very good job of it.
One little tip - if you want a snippet with paragraph returns (i.e. an address of several lines) make the snippet on the Mac (in System Preferences/Keyboard/Text) by pasting in what you want the expanded snippet to look like (i.e. multiple lines) and then this will sync across to your iOS devices and retain the line breaks.
Yeah the existing TE runs fine in Catalina - I have expansion turned off on the Mac but I keep it running and use Hazel to add my new Alfred snippets to TE.
I love Alfred but I cannot find a place for current posts and workflows. Even those forums say Alfred 2 and 3… no mention of 4 at top. Am I missing something there? Is there another spot for vibrant Alfred chat and workflow sharing?
Those are the official forums. They are very
active and helpful. I’ve been using Alfred since beta 0.9 & most of what I’ve built has required very few changes over the years.
It surely does. There’s a free trial to download and try. It will import your regular TextExpander snippets, but you’ll have to edit and fix up the fill-ins to the syntax for Typinator.
There’s also aText which is cheaper and also imports most TextExpander snippets too.
Ok I watched the videos on Typinator. It looks good. I will probably buy it to support the devs but I am not ready to drop TE yet. I keep hoping Smile will right the ship in iOS. Smile and Readdle are the two most frustrating companies for me on IOS and really just make me want to use my iPhone as a phone only.
I am probably one of few that has benefitted from the TE subscription model as I now can use my snippets on my work PC. That has been a bottle of water for me since they released the beta, and probably saved me from RSI.
Without support for external keyboards on iOS though, the TE business model seems pretty futile. It has been a major factor for using Drafts for everything for me, but the reliance on Drafts cannot be good for smile in the long run.
I tried like heck to use TE in iOS when it was first available and it was a joke. It never go any better and while I really hated to loose TE, I’ve managed to recreate its functionality with keyboardmaestro. TE was a wonderful product at one point but greed and iOS killed it IMHO.
if it wasn’t for Drafts, TextExpander for iOS would not even exist now. Drafts and the url schemes as the front end are keeping TE iOS afloat. Smile has run off so many users and devs. I bought Devonthink for iOS today and noticed that TE was not working in the note body when you add a text note. So I reported it and they gave the impression that I was the first one to report it. The last update to Devonthink was 6 months ago. So am I to believe that in 6 months not one person noticed that TE integration was failing? Unbelievable.
Same as me. I use Keyboard Maestro for snippets with no problem. I don’t have bucketfuls of them of course. It is my main us of Keyboard Maestro in fact.
I have also had issues with Smile Software’s PDFPen so I guess their software development team is not up to the level required in this ever changing environment.
I switched to PDFExpert.
You had to give a lot of respect to Greg OMS of Agile Tortoise ability to continuously deliver value.
Proves there are good and bad subscriptions so vote with your wallet snd support the Greg’s of the community.
