I’ve been an avid Text Expander user for years. When Textexpander Touch came out I was ecstatic until I realized it didn’t work the way TextExpander did. TextExpander just worked anywhere and everywhere. The snippets of text that you designed for output worked in any application allowing for reuse.
Time and Finger Saver
The way TextExpander and ultimately Touch Expander are supposed to work is to cut down on your typing by allowing you to define a snippet of informtion and have that automatically output by the use of a simple and short key combination.
As you can see, the product is a real time and finger saver if religiously used. Often, you would have snippets of information and based on the frequency with which you typed a phrase or that you might type it you would make it a snippet with a shortcut.
In the Mac environment this worked incredibly well. However, on IOS this approach only worked with Touch Expander aware apps thus limiting its potential.
Frustration
To say the least, this was very frustrating and while there was lots of room to have a TextExpander kind of experience on IOS, we only could have this with programs that worked intricately with TextExpander Touch.
This was more than frustrating as TextExpander Touch only worked with a very small goup of applications. The day of this being the case though is now over.
TextExpander Touch Blossoms
In TextExpander Touch 3.23 Smile software added a keyboard that allows the program to expand snippets everywhere. In a way, this has been a breakthrough for IOS.
The programs that have been developed for TextExpander Touch are far more capable however. They can do things other than just expand rudimentary text. Regardless, this universality to work on any program has made TextExpander Touch far more valuable. In fact, I find now that the program is invaluable to me.
Bright Future
With its ability to sync with the desktop and the universality of the program to expand a snippets anywhere TextExpander Touch’s future is bright. There was a period, when Apple made some changes, that it’s future didn’t look very optimistic.
In some ways, the ability to expand text on an IOS device is more useful than that of of regular computer. The desktops keyboard is nice to work with whereas IOS’s keyboard is problematic. Text expansion in IOS is a natural whether you use an external keyboard or not. It just speeds things up and really saves on the fingers.
If you have IOS, use TextExpander at the desktop it is a no brainer to use it in IOS. You can only benefit from the combination or in fact just TextExpander Touch. It really does make that much of a difference.