It’s that time of year again. Smile will be at Macworld|iWorld this year. You’ll find us in the OS X Developer Zone (#201) and in the Mobile Applications Showcase (#818), where we’ll be showing off our iOS products.
We are also happy to announce that the popular “Meet the Podcasters” is back. Each day at 3 p.m., we’ll host some of your favorite podcasters at the Smile kiosk in #201. The podcasters will be there to meet listeners and answer questions.
Thursday, January 26, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun Mac Geek Gab
Friday, January 27, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Adam Christianson The MacCast
Saturday, January 28, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Katie Floyd & David Sparks Mac Power Users
Smile is proud to be a sponsor of these great podcasts. Come on by just to say “hi” or chat about the Mac, iPhone and iPad. These are the experts!
(Photos, l-to-r: Dave Hamilton, John F. Braun, Adam Christianson, Katie Floyd, David Sparks)
Smile is participating in the Apps for Water fundraiser for charity:water. All the developers will donate their revenue from app sales on December 20, 2011.
charity: water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects.
We really appreciate Gaucho Software‘s Mike Piatek-Jimenez, who did all the hard work of putting this project together. We’ve done a special discount of 20% on our Mac apps to encourage you to buy great software and support a very worthwhile cause at the same time.
And if you already own PDFpen, TextExpander and DiscLabel, check out the other great software that is available, or consider giving gift licenses to your favorite Mac users.
Now that TextExpander itself is AppleScriptable (as of version 3.3), there’s an easier and more flexible way to do this:
Choose File -> New Group
Name the new group Random
Add snippets that you’d like to be chosen at random into the Random group. You can drag existing snippets from other groups into Random, or you can create snippets expressly for use in Random. Tip: if you are creating new snippets for use only as random snippets, you can save time and work by not assigning abbreviations to these snippets.
Make a new snippet in a group other than the Random group
Set the Content: of the new snippet to AppleScript
Enter this for the snippet:
tell application "TextExpander"
set groupCount to count (snippets of group "Random")
set randomIndex to random number from 1 to groupCount
return plain text expansion of ¬
snippet randomIndex of group "Random"
end tell
Set an abbreviation for this new snippet, for example: rrand
Any time you type rrand, you’ll get a random selection from among the snippets in your Random group.
The advantages of this technique over the one linked above are:
You need not know the abbreviations for all of the snippets in advance
You can add to and remove from your Random group without changing anything
(Thanks to Sheree Peña of Black Pixel for the inspiration for this post.)
One of the changes we made in TextExpander version 3.3.4 was to stop expansion and capitalization correction when using input methods which combine keystrokes. Several of our users told us that having TextExpander active while they were typing into Japanese or Chinese input methods caused problems because capitalization and/or snippet expansion would interfere with the construction of multi-keystroke characters. Based on user feedback, we made TextExpander 3.3.4 detect the “primary language” of the current input method and ignore anything typed in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Hindi.
Now, we are hearing from other TextExpander users who found it useful to expand snippets while typing in these input methods.
Perhaps we should have disabled only capitalization correction for these input methods. Users who found snippet expansion troublesome might have to find better abbreviations for their snippets. If you have any strong feelings or suggestions for solutions, let us know at support@smilesoftware.com.
TextExpander v. 3.3.4 and above has a setting which can restore expansion and capitalization correction for any language where it is currently disabled. TEIMPrefSetter can be used to change that setting:
A couple of unfortunate issues have cropped up in the recently-released TextExpander 3.3. We wanted to make you aware of them and offer workarounds.
AppleScript Snippets
If you create a new snippet and set it to AppleScript, TextExpander 3.3 still treats the new snippet as a text snippet. When you expand it, the result will be the content of the AppleScript, not the script results. Any AppleScript snippets you created in earlier versions are still treated as AppleScript snippets.
As a workaround, you can duplicate an existing AppleScript snippet and then edit its contents.
Apple Script and Shell Script Snippets and “%”
This issue with shell script and AppleScript snippets involves the % (percent) symbol. TextExpander has always used % to delimit macros. In a script snippet, TextExpander 3.3 is treating the % as a macro delimiter, which allows you to embed snippets within script snippet source code, but this has the unfortunate side effect of misinterpreting occurrences of ‘%’ as a character.
One workaround is to use 2 percentage signs (%%) to “escape” the % character (TextExpander power user @drdrang posted more about this on his blog), but this is inconvenient and does not work if the script snippet itself is embedded within another snippet.
If you use script snippets a good deal, you may want to consider reverting back to TextExpander 3.2.4. We do apologize for the aggravation and we hope to release a fix shortly in TextExpander 3.3.1.
Virtual keyboards are on-screen representations of a keyboard which allow you to enter characters by clicking the mouse or other pointing device. That is, you move the mouse to the part of the screen where the ‘v’ key is, click the mouse, and a ‘v’ appears in your text document. (Note: there are other types of virtual keyboards in addition to the on-screen, mouse-driven variety, but this post does not cover them.) One reason to use a virtual keyboard is if you have trouble typing on a physical keyboard.
Mac OS X built-in Keyboard Viewer
TextExpander has some issues with virtual keyboards. When you click the mouse, TextExpander assumes that you are moving the text insertion point within a document, selecting a range of text, changing to a different window or text area, or performing some kind of formatting or other command. Thus, when you click the mouse, TextExpander clears the buffer of typed characters it maintains to track when you type a snippet abbreviation.
For example, with the ‘ddate’ snippet, when you click the ‘d’ key on the virtual keyboard the first time, TextExpander clears the buffer because the mouse was clicked, then notices that a ‘d’ has been typed. When you click the ‘d’ key the second time, TextExpander again clears the buffer, then stores the ‘d’. The snippet never expands because TextExpander keeps clearing its buffer, never tracking more than one character at a time.
If there is another virtual keyboard program that you are using, there is a “hidden” setting in TextExpander that will allow you to use it before support is “built-in” to TextExpander. Just contact support@smilesoftware.com for details.
Smile will be back at Macworld Expo this year. You can find us in the Indie Developer Pavillion (246 – 1).
We are also happy to announce that some of your favorite podcasters will make appearances at the Smile kiosk during Macworld, to meet listeners and answer questions. Maybe they’ll even sign autographs. ;-)
Thursday, January 27, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun Mac Geek Gab
Friday, January 28, 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Adam Christianson The MacCast
Saturday, January 29, 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Katie Floyd & David Sparks Mac Power Users
Smile is proud to be a sponsor of these great podcasts. Come on by just to say “hi” or chat about Mac stuff.
(Photos, l-to-r: Dave Hamilton, John F. Braun, Adam Christianson, Katie Floyd, David Sparks)
The Mac App Store is a big deal for third-party Mac developers like Smile. For the first time, Apple is making it easy to buy and install software without ever going to a website, downloading a demo, or clicking an installer. Because it’s built into the OS, every Mac user will have a convenient option for purchasing software.
PDFpen, PDFpenPro and DiscLabel were available on Day One. (We hope TextExpander will be available soon!) The Mac App Store is not our exclusive channel for sales. Customers are still able to download and purchase applications directly from smilesoftware.com. We have kept the same prices for both channels.
We will continue to provide updates to our existing customers outside the Mac App Store. Choose “Check for Update…” in the application menu to download the latest version. You can set automatic update checking and its frequency via the Update preference pane.
The versions of our software in the Mac App Store are functionally the same as the versions available on our site. We had to make a few adjustments to meet Apple’s criteria, and that resulted in a discrepancy in version numbers.
Updates for both Mac App Store-purchased software and independently-purchased software will be on the same schedule, although there may be a lag for the Mac App Store updates due to Apple’s review process.
You might have noticed that your Smile applications are not marked “Installed” in the Mac App Store. That’s because they weren’t purchased through the Mac App Store. The Mac App Store only supports updating products purchased via the Mac App Store. The fact that it shows some products purchased independently as installed is simply a convenience and is in some cases misleading.
If you have any questions at all, please let us know at support@smilesoftware.com. You’ll get a fast, friendly answer from our support team.
Apparently, people like the idea of a short work week, the shorter, the better. That helped Tim Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, become a huge best-seller. An authority on working smarter, not harder, Tim is always looking for a better way to do things.
For the promotion of his new book, The 4-Hour Body, Tim contacted Smile with a question:
Can you make images clickable in a PDF with PDFpen?
Answer: Yes! That’s a standard PDFpen feature. Just use the URL tool to draw a rectangle of the element you want to make clickable. PDFpen will prompt you for a link and you’re done.
We followed up with Tim to learn more about how he uses PDFpen, and found out about his clever use of mini-books for promotional purposes, attractively designed with images linked to Amazon.
* * * * *
Smile: How did you find out about PDFpen?
Tim: My assistant, Charlie Hoehn, who scours the web for the best of the best.
Smile: Were you using another tool that didn’t work for you? Why?
Tim: To create excerpt “mini-books” that can be promoted by bloggers via blogs and Facebook as free downloads. It was important that we made them attractive, and that we include clickable links to Amazon, etc.
There are many more used also in e-mail campaigns.
Smile: Do you have any PDFpen tips or tricks to share?
Tim: Haha… not really. The reason I love PDFpen is that I don’t need any tips and tricks to make it work. It’s a five-minute learning curve. I just want to get #$%& done
Tim: Would you recommend PDFpen to other Mac users?
Absolutely. It saved the day.
Smile: What are you working on now?
Tim: The new book, The 4-Hour Body, is looking to be bigger than the first book, and it took three years to write. Here’s the description — lots of blood, sweat, and tears (all literal)!
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:
For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women.
From the gym to the bedroom, it’s all here, and it all works.
There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects. You don’t need better genetics or more discipline. You need immediate results that compel you to continue.
That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers.
Here’s the YouTube trailer (1 min.):
We wish Tim all the best for success with his new book.
We are often asked if PDFpen supports the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners. Support is not built into OS X for these scanners, so PDFpen cannot detect them when connected using its “Import from Scanner” command. With a little configuration, however, the software that comes with the ScanSnap, ScanSnap Manager, makes it easy to scan direct to PDFpen. Here’s how:
To configure, launch ScanSnap Manager, or bring it to the front via command-tab.
1) Choose Settings from the ScanSnap Manager menu.
2) In the resulting window uncheck “Use Quick Menu”.
3) Click “Detail” to show all the settings tabs.
4) Under the “Application” tab select PDFpen as the application. You’ll likely need to use “Add or Remove” to add PDFpen to the list of choices first.
5) Under “File Option” select PDF as the file format. Uncheck “Convert to searchable PDF”.
6) Go back to “Application”. Click the “Hide” button, and close the settings window.
Now when you press the scan button on the scanner it will scan and then automatically open the result in PDFpen.
Smile: How did you find out about PDFpen?
