A bug in Firefox and Chrome can deprive TextExpander of its ability to observe keyboard input by enabling “secure input” and neglecting to disable it. We first posted about the issue last June.
The Mozilla team have found a fix, and it’s available now in the Firefox nightly build. The fix is also slated to be available in Firefox 4.0b12.
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’ve changed TextExpander’s automatic capitalization feature substantially in version 3.2.2 to improve its performance based on customer feedback. Previously, there were several situations where TextExpander would capitalize letters when it should not. The 3.2.2 version is much less likely to capitalize letters incorrectly. Download TextExpander 3.2.2.
A few specific factors frustrated TextExpander users:
1. TextExpander assumed you were starting a new sentence when switching from one application to another. That is, if you were typing an email, switched to your browser to look up something, then switched back to the email to finish your sentence, the first word typed would be capitalized regardless of its position within a sentence.
2. If you typed a period or other sentence-ending punctuation, then used the mouse to change the position of the insertion cursor, the next word typed would be capitalized regardless of its position within a sentence.
3. Any time you re-positioned the insertion cursor using the arrow keys, TextExpander would not auto-capitalize again until you typed a sentence-ending character.
These issues have been addressed in TextExpander 3.2.2. In applications that thoroughly support Apple’s accessibility interface, TextExpander can now examine the text near the insertion cursor to determine whether the cursor is in a sentence-starting location. Unfortunately, many popular applications do not support this interface, so users of applications such as BBEdit and Microsoft Word users will find that the new version of TextExpander just doesn’t automatically capitalize as often. At least unwanted capitalizations should no longer occur in those applications.
Another common case of unwanted capitalization resulted when typing web or email addresses. That is, typing Smile’s web address would result in: www.Smilesoftware.Com with unwanted capital ‘S’ and ‘C’. TextExpander now waits for a space or line break after punctuation before activating automatic capitalization.
Additionally, short snippets such as “i “ -> “I “ and “u “ -> “you “ used at the start of a sentence with capitalization enabled resulted in incorrect expansion output which has been fixed.
For the future, a few users have requested that “Eliminate double capitals at sentence start” be changed to “Eliminate double capitals at word start”. That is, it would suppress a second capital letter at the start of a word anywhere. This is helpful to avoid errors like “TRacy” or “NOrth”, but it does replace “OK” with “Ok” (which can be ‘fixed’ with an “OK” -> “OK” snippet). If you have an opinion on this possible future change, let us know your thoughts and reasoning.
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.
In addition to plain text and formatted text, pictures snippets, TextExpander also supports AppleScript and shell scripts as content types. Your abbreviation will expand to whatever the script returns. This allows you to extend TextExpander in whatever ways you need. Here’s a recent example which started with a support question:
> I've created the following snippet with abbreviation: ,getdate:
>
> %date:EEEE% %date:d% %date:LLLL% %date:Y% - día %date:D% del año
>
> Which is converted to the following on my system:
>
> jueves 30 septiembre 2010 - día 273 del año
>
> However, I would like the day of the week and month to be in uppercase, as follows:
>
> Jueves 30 Septiembre 2010 - día 273 del año
>
> Do you know how to do this?
It seems that the Unicode date formatting doesn’t offer a way to specify that the month or day names should be returned in uppercase.
I was able to write a Perl script and to nest the ,getdate snippet to convert the first and third words to uppercase. I set my abbreviation to ,date and my Content: to Shell Script:
One of my favorite new features of PDFpenPro 5 is the ability to create a PDF from HTML files or a web site.
Customers often ask for a printable copy of the help with our products. The help is initially created in HTML that can be indexed and viewed through Apple’s Help Viewer, and also viewed in a web browser. To print it, however, would mean going to every web page in the help and manually printing each one.
Creating the PDF was very easy in PDFpenPro. Here’s how.. in PDFpenPro select File->New->From HTML…, then enter the URL for the index page, and how many levels deep to go. One level is the page itself. Two levels does the page and the links from that page. Two is just right for the help. Click Create and a PDF will be created from the given URL and its immediate links.
The links within the resulting PDF all operate, and even a table of contents is generated!
To finish the job I chose “Number Pages” from PDFpenPro’s Script menu, and then inserted a blank page at the start of the document and used it to place a title.
The new help PDF file can now be saved and printed with ease.
Further to our post about disappearing snippets, we have identified at least one issue and have fixed it in TextExpander 3.1.1. We’ve seeded this fix to several customers and have received positive feedback that it fixed the problem for them.
Please download and install the TextExpander 3.1.1 update. If you do experience a snippet loss, please let us know. If there are any other issues, we want to find them.
Per our earlier post, please do the following if you experience the problem:
If you experience this problem, you can restore your snippet library by quitting TextExpander and restoring this file from your Time Machine or other backup:
Before you re-launch TextExpander, please also send a copy of the restored file to us at textexpander@smileonmymac.com. This is especially helpful if you find the problem recurs for you. If we gather enough settings files, hopefully we’ll find one with which we can reproduce the problem. If we can reproduce it we can almost certainly fix it. In the meantime, we’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
We appreciate your help in making TextExpander the best it can be.
Smile: How did you find out about PDFpen?
