News

Greetings and salutations, would-be customers. Should you wish to avail yourselves of a copy of  TypeIt4Me for the outrageously modest price of $4.99 in US dollars, you have just 10 days left to do so. Our longest-running promotion is finally drawing to a close: the current 75% off TypeIt4Me special offer will expire at the end of this month. Any of you who may have been planning to purchase our flagship text expander app for the Mac would do well to take the plunge sooner rather than later, before the price goes back up to $19.99.

If you cast your minds back to the heady euphoria of 2012′s Olympic summer, you may remember that in a fit of exuberant generosity we slashed 75% off the regular price of TypeIt4Me for a limited time. Resulting in a price $4 lower than the cost of a regular $8.99 licence upgrade, this was a goodwill gesture designed to allow existing customers to transition to our new iCloud-enabled Mac App Store version without having to pay the full $19.99 again.

The temporary price drop has proved to be a very popular move and uptake of this special offer has been high. With TypeIt4Me having remained at the super low $4.99 price point for well over 9 months, it’s our considered assessment that customers have been afforded ample opportunity to take advantage of the offer. We feel now is an appropriate time to return to business as usual, so from June 1st, TypeIt4Me will once again cost $19.99 USD. We would urge you to grab it from the Mac App Store before then in order to save yourselves some wedge, get iCloud syncing and enjoy free 5.x updates. If you prefer, you can also still buy version 5.2.1 directly from us. It’s almost identical to the App Store version but does not include iCloud support.

Any crestfallen stragglers who may be reading this having arrived at the party too late to catch the special offer, don’t despair. We hope you’ll discover that even at full price TypeIt4Me still represents outstanding value for money, particularly in view of the fact that similarly full-featured text expansion apps currently on the market would set you back around $30-$35.

As ever, we’re very grateful for all the support and encouragement we’ve received and will continue in our efforts to bring you software that will make your lives easier. Many thanks -and stay tuned for future announcements and promotions.

Psssst. Eagle-eyed followers of our software offerings may have spotted that TypeIt4Me is featured on the cover of MacLife magazine’s June 2013 edition, as part of its 20 Killer Mac Apps Under $20 feature. Why not seize the moment and grab a copy of TypeIt4Me while it’s still on special offer for under five bucks? It won’t be available at such a silly low price for much longer…

Good news, everyone: we’re pleased to announce that TypeIt4Me 5.3.2 is now available to download at the Mac App Store. Before you get too excited though, please note that it’s a maintenance update only. As much as we’d love to go crazy and add a bunch of cool new stuff to TypeIt4Me’s repertoire of text expanding tricks, this would unfortunately fall foul of Apple’s new rules governing Mac App Store updates. We’re strictly prohibited from tacking new functionality onto non-sandboxed apps in the store, and as sandboxing TypeIt4Me would seriously impair its usefulness this release focuses on fixing bugs instead. Those of you who were really holding out hope for a new built-in shortcut that automatically writes your term papers for you, we’re sorry to have to disappoint you there.

Now that we’ve managed your expectations we can move swiftly on to detail the more joyous tidings that this release otherwise brings with it. After a busy few months tinkering under the hood, we’ve given TypeIt4Me a tune-up to ensure that it runs more smoothly. A number of outstanding glitches and performance issues that some of you reported have been addressed. Specifically, for this spit and polish update we’ve:

• Corrected the “missing file” message where you should instead see “do not expand” or “expand using…” in the Applications tab of Preferences.
• Added the missing US flag when selecting AutoCorrect with US locale (the Union Jack was already there for British locale users).
• Fixed cursor positioning in snippets including date/time.
• Fixed a bug that cropped up when saving changes with a filter on.
• Fixed an issue where adding a snippet to a set in iCloud would cause the focus to be lost or jump to the wrong snippet.
• Fixed an issue encountered when trying to insert a clipping within another clipping via the insert menu at the bottom right. Previously, nothing was available to insert – the “clipping” menu was empty.
• Fixed converting a plain text, tab delimited file to TypeIt4Me format.
• Fixed an issue related to the snippets file not being in its correct location (Sets folder inside TypeIt4Me’s Application Support folder).

Once again, many thanks to those of you who helped us to identify these issues so that we could remedy them. And while we’re at it, kudos to Apple for honouring its pledge to allow developers to continue fixing bugs in their non-sandboxed Mac App Store offerings.

We hope you’ll get on well with this update – it may not be a revolutionary leap forward, but it ought to improve your TypeIt4Me experience, nonetheless. As always, we welcome customer feedback. If you run into any further performance issues, please let us know about them so we can sort them out for you.

After 16 days waiting for review, TypeIt4Me 5.3.1 is finally available in the Mac App Store.
Remember that the *only* extra feature in 5.3.x vs 5.2.x is iCloud support, which can *only* be offered in apps sold in the Mac App Store (Apple’s rules, not ours).

To celebrate the release and allow any of our long standing, loyal users to upgrade to 5.3.1 without paying full price again, we are going to drop the price on the Mac App Store to $4.99 for a limited time. That’s a whopping 75% off and is even cheaper than the $8.99 we normally charge for upgrades.

If you need/want iCloud support, which works great with the companion TypeIt4Me Touch app on iPhone and iPad, now is the time to head to the Mac App Store and grab a copy for yourself and perhaps a gift one (or two) for your friends.

After 16 days “Waiting for review”, TypeIt4Me 5.3.1 – which fixes several bugs, including date/time expansion, Add a clipping and triggering abbs using TAB in Safari – is finally “In Review” and should therefore shortly become available in the Mac App Store.

Remember that if you are currently using TypeIt4Me 5.2.1 and do not need/want iCloud support, you can stay with 5.2.1 as 5.3.1 only adds iCloud support and no other features.

Users reported a bug that prevents dates from expanding in version 5.3 (the Mac App Store version released 9th July). We fixed this and two other bugs (related to Add a clipping and TAB triggering in Safari) yesterday and 5.3.1 is now “Waiting for review” in the App Store. Apologies for the inconvenience.

TypeIt4Me version 5.3 is now available to download from the Mac App Store.  As promised, this latest version includes iCloud support, so you can use your TypeIt4Me abbreviations seamlessly across all your Macs – and with TypeIt4Me Touch on your iPad or iPhone. You’ll notice there’s a new pane just above your TypeIt4Me clippings that enables you to manage your local abbreviation sets and drag them across to iCloud and back again as you see fit:

A note for customers who purchase TypeIt4Me outside of the Mac App Store:

Apple currently only permits applications sold through the Mac App Store to access iCloud, so for now, the incarnation of TypeIt4Me available for direct download from the Ettore Software website will remain at version 5.2.1 rather than 5.3. That’s while we evaluate options for adding some form of access to iCloud, for example via a ‘helper’ application made available separately on the Mac App Store.

Good day to you fine folk out there in shiny Appletopia! Remember us? We’re back with a long overdue update to bring you up to speed with the latest developments and tittle-tattle here at Ettore Towers. We realise the unusually prolonged bout of radio silence may have had one or two of you absently wondering if we’d perished at the hands of frozen night terrors during the winter. Well fear not, for we managed to elude the White Walkers and now that spring has sprung [a leak] we can emerge blinking into the drizzle to give you the lowdown.

So just what have we been doing besides slurping porridge and bingeing on Game of Thrones? To cut a long story short, we’ve been working our socks off. Those of you who’ve been following our software development efforts for a while will have noticed by now that when we go quiet it means we’re super busy squashing bugs, responding to customer feedback and painstakingly building superior iterations of our app offerings. In recent months we’ve been particularly focused on beefing up TypeIt4Me in order to better support your evolving stenographic text expansion needs. Not only is a Mac update nearing completion, but – without wanting to give too much away – we also have a little treat in store on the mobile side of things. Stay tuned for a forthcoming announcement…

…In other news, after the ringing endorsement TypeIt4Me received from Lifehacker in their Mac Text Expansion Faceoff last year, we’re pumped to see the venerable Adam Dachis is still a keen TypeIt4Me user. You can watch him discussing its usefulness in this Take It to the Cloud podcast (about 16 minutes in). The dude’s not on our payroll, we swear – he’s just awesome :)

The 75% special offer in the Mac App Store ended on August 1. Thank you to all who purchased TypeIt4Me and made it climb high in the Mac App Store charts. The price has now reverted to the normal $19.99 both in the Mac App Store and directly from http://ettoresoftware.com

Hear ye, hear ye! Calling all Mac fans and text expansion enthusiasts. For a limited time only, you can take advantage of a Mac App Store exclusive offer and buy TypeIt4Me for the downright silly price of just $4.99 (USD). There’s no need to rub your eyes, you read that right. $4.99 in US dollars. That’s £2.99 for those of you in the UK and 3.99€ for eurozone dwellers. We’ve gone soft in the head with Lion mania and to celebrate the imminent launch of Apple’s latest big cat operating system – Mac OS X 10.7 – we’ve temporarily slashed the price of TypeIt4Me in the Mac App Store by 75%. This special offer will end on August 1st. If you act fast, you can grab yourselves a stonking great bargain.

Even those of you who have already purchased a TypeIt4Me licence from us directly in the past might wish to consider grabbing it from the Mac App Store* now while it’s as cheap as chips. Doing so would entitle you to free updates for all future TypeIt4Me 5.x versions, meaning you could avoid stumping up the standard $8.99 fee for upgrades that will otherwise come into effect 18 months from your initial purchase. Food for thought, no? Why not spread the word and let your friends get a slice of the action, too. …Mmmmmmm, tasty, tasty TypeIt4Me.

* Note that before buying it from the Mac App Store, you will need to quit your existing copy of TypeIt4Me and move it from your Applications folder to the Trash. Don’t worry, your existing clippings and settings will be preserved. After purchasing TypeIt4Me from the Mac App Store, simply double-click your clippings file (usually stored in Home or Documents folder and ending in .typeit4me).

Howdy folks, we’re just poking our heads over the parapet to bring you news that TypeIt4Me 5.2 is out today. This update is free if you paid for a full or upgraded licence after 1 January 2010 – so if you’ve already given us some of your hard earned dosh at some point in the last 18 months, you’re good to go. Otherwise you’ll need to stump up a modest US$8.99 if you want to benefit from the latest features. Can’t say fairer than that, can we?

New or changed features in TypeIt4Me 5.2:

• We’ve added a spiffy new Date / Time Math function that will expand a date abbreviation of your choosing to a calculated-on-the-fly date and / or time in the future. Or in the past, for that matter… It’s better than a flux capacitor, really. Great Scott!
• There’s a new way to issue a SHIFT-TAB (which can move the cursor to a cell to the left in a table or to a previous field in a form).
• As requested by one of our customers, we’ve introduced another ‘hidden’ option. It tells TypeIt4Me not to use just the first four characters of what you’ve copied to the clipboard as a default suggestion when proposing an abbreviation in Add a Clipping:
  defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu shortenProposedAbb -bool NO
  

  For now, the above command needs to be copied and pasted – or typed – in Terminal as the option is not currently included in TypeIt4Me’s preferences screen.  If this feature proves popular we will look into making it more user friendly in a future release. If you try it and decide you don’t like it, you can revert to normal by firing up Terminal again and entering the following line:
  defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu shortenProposedAbb -bool YES

A few users alerted me last week that 5.1 (44) no longer worked on their PPC (non-Intel) Macs.

Turns out that in order to compile for PPC, Xcode 3.2.6 now requires manual intervention to change the default setting, which is now Intel only.

Today, we replaced the TypeIt4Me binary included on the distribution disk image with a binary that supports PPC as well as Intel and will run on both Leopard and Snow Leopard:

http://www.ettoresoftware.com/products/typeit4me/downloads/TypeIt4Me.dmg

Unless you are still using a PPC, non-Intel Mac, there is NO need to download this version which is otherwise identical to 5.1(44).

With Lion 10.7 coming later this summer, 5.1(45) may very well be the last PPC-friendly version and we may also be dropping Leopard support, focussing on Snow Leopard and Lion only.

NB This version now supports Command-Q to quit the app. If you prefer NOT to have this, open Terminal and paste in the following command:
defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu AddCmdQ -bool NO