I love it that so many people are excited about the release of TextExpander touch for the iPhone tomorrow. We’ve been inundated with requests for this since the iPhone was first introduced, so it’s nice to give the people what they want.
I also feel it’s important to be absolutely clear about what TextExpander cannot do.
Chris Pirillo, of Lockergnome fame, sent me this question:
“Will the iPhone app work like the desktop version? 
How on earth did you pull that off!?”
The short answer to the question is “no”.
We have no special superhero powers over the iPhone OS. No Jedi mind tricks. TextExpander touch, like other third-party iPhone apps, cannot run in the background. You won’t be able to type your abbreviations to trigger expansions while you are working in other apps. (Not yet, anyway. See Greg’s post about the TextExpander touch SDK.)
But that doesn’t mean TextExpander touch will be a disappointment. Because what it can do, it can do very well:
- We have made it as seamless as possible for composing notes and inserting them to email or your Twitter client. We’ve also made it easy to copy your composed notes to other apps.
- You can import your snippet groups from the Mac via local network. That is a handy thing to have on your iPhone, even if you never use TextExpander touch for a single text expansion. You’ll have a library of your most frequently-used phrases, signatures, URLs, etc. We’ve made it simple to insert a snippet into email or Twitter, skipping the Compose step altogether.
- It will be easy to create snippets, using the new copy-and-paste function as well. If you have received an email with some standard paragraph you want to use again, you can copy it and create a TextExpander touch snippet with only a few taps on your iPhone.
Remember when you first started using TextExpander? You might have had a handful of snippets, like your email signature or a standard answer to a frequently-asked question. But the more you used TextExpander, the more ideas you got for how you could use it.
And many of you shared your ideas with us. Autocorrect spelling errors? HTML code snippets? URL shortening? All these ideas for extending TextExpander’s usefulness came from TextExpander users.
People will start coming up with productivity hacks using TextExpander touch the way they have for TextExpander. You’ll share your ideas with your friends (and with us, we hope) and TextExpander touch will evolve within the context of the iPhone.
That’s worth a few bucks.