News

We are happy to report that since we released version 2.0 of SpeakMyTunes yesterday, it has climbed all the way to the top of the Mac App Store’s free Music downloads chart in Italy. Not only is it occupying the number one spot in the Music category, but at the time of writing it’s also the seventh most popular free app overall. It’s great to see people enjoying SpeakMyTunes and giving us so much positive feedback. We will of course continue development and add further features in future. Grazie mille.

Yep, we like to keep busy. Hot on the heels of version 1.0′s debut less than a month ago, it’s our pleasure to announce that SpeakMyTunes 2.0 is available for download now. You can grab it straight from our website or, if you prefer, from Apple’s Mac App Store.

It was just a bit of fun when we launched it, but SpeakMyTunes has proven to be quite a hit. In a few short weeks our freeware song announcer for iTunes has been downloaded by thousands of music lovers across the globe. We’d like to thank everyone for the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response: your positive feedback and suggestions just keep pouring in. As you might expect, we’re pretty jazzed that people are enjoying SpeakMyTunes and finding it useful. Encouraged by your kind words and great ideas, we’ve gone on to add some spiffy new features. This is what’s new in version 2.0:

• You can now compose your own announcement, by combining and reordering any of the available song information tags with custom phrasing you type yourself.
• There are four new song information elements: Genre, Composer, Year and Comments.
• Pausing iTunes during SpeakMyTunes announcements is now optional.
• We’ve added an independent volume control for voice announcements.
• The application icon can be displayed in the dock only, in the menubar only, or in both.
• SpeakMyTunes has been localised for French, Spanish and Italian users.

That’s it for the time being. We hope you’ll get a kick out of these improvements – we’ve certainly enjoyed the challenge of implementing your requested features. Anyway, have fun tweaking SpeakMyTunes to your hearts’ content and keep the feedback coming. We love to hear your thoughts. Toodle pip…à bientôt…adiós…and arrivederci!

Good news, everyone! We’re pleased to introduce our new Mac freeware offering: SpeakMyTunes. This latest addition to the Ettore Software product lineup is a song announcer for iTunes. It can read out loud the title of the song currently playing in iTunes, then cheerfully inform you who’s performing it and which album it’s on. If, like us, you have less than perfect vision and despair of having to squint in vain to read the tiny text in iTunes, you might want to try it out. It’s also useful for free roaming spirits who listen to shuffled playlists while wandering about the room. Granted, it’s not going to cure the common cold or make you coffee in the mornings, but it is free, so why not take it for a spin and let us know what you think?

You may possibly have heard hushed whispers and noticed a few subtle indications that royal nuptials are afoot. Supposedly, some prince or other might be getting hitched at Westminster Abbey tomorrow. It could just be hearsay and we’re not sure we believe these vague rumours, but we’ve decided to enter into the spirit of things, regardless. Any excuse for a party: we love a good old-fashioned knees-up, we do.

As the world vigorously celebrates all things quaintly British and somewhat pointless, we’re delighted to inform you that we’ve spruced up our BigBen clock app, giving it a makeover for this most romantic occasion. For a limited time, you can download it to your iPhone for free. Why not whip it out during the ceremony and wipe away a tear as you salute the monarchy and listen to our cherished London icon belt out its famous Westminster Chimes? Ding Dong!

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally updated BigBen with some hi-res photos and professionally recorded chimes.

It now plays every quarter and correctly starts the chime on the hour, to end in time for the first bong to play as the clock strikes the hour.

Check it out here and tell all your friends.

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

Select Check for updates from the TypeIt4Me menu. If you purchased TypeIt4Me from the Mac App Store, the new version will show up in your updates list in a week or so, once Apple approves it.

New or changed features:

• Added Show Duplicates.
• Added warning when pasting clippings (cmd-v) would create duplicate(s).
• In Edit Clippings window, cmd-F now moves keyboard focus to search field, cmd-L to clippings list.
• Periodic file save now only happens if there are unsaved changes.
• The position of the vertical split bar in Edit Clippings window is saved and restored.
• Added the following 3 options, each requested by a single user:
  - defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu noFadeEffectOnMainWindow -bool YES
  - defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu dontProposeContentsOfPasteboard -bool YES
  - defaults write com.typeit4me.TypeIt4MeMenu AddCmdQ -bool YES
  The above commands need to be typed in Terminal as there is currently no UI for them in the preferences.
• Added “ALMOST EQUAL TO” (Unicode 2248) to set of punctuation signs (“.,+-~/”) that can precede numerals in abbs that expand number+suffix combos.
• Users can now add more than one backspace symbols at the start of clippings.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed crashes when launching TypeIt4Me when its preferences file has become corrupted.
• Restored “Trigger on period(.) followed by another delimiter” functionality.

A bug in Firefox can prevent any text expander, including TypeIt4Me, from observing keyboard input because “Secure Event Input” is enabled when a user enters a password but not always disabled when leaving the password field.

This bug was reported back in April 2010 and the Mozilla team have now provided a fix, available in the Firefox nightly build and in an upcoming beta release.

The above bug in Firefox and several other applications, including Quicken, is what prompted us to add a Growl notification every time TypeIt4Me detects that Secure Event Input has been enabled. This will alert the user that TypeIt4Me will no longer expand until Secure Event Input has been disabled.

If you see the Growl message and it isn’t followed by one to say that Secure Event Input has been disabled (once the password entry action is completed, for example), please make a note of what application you are using so we can report this to their developers.

If you do not have Growl installed, we would heartily recommend you install it as it can be very useful over and beyond the TypeIt4Me-related notification.

Good news, everyone: in the wake of an unprecedented surge in sales of TypeIt4Me, we’ve reviewed our pricing model and decided to permanently lower prices across the board – with the cost of a standard single user licence dropping from $27 to just $19.99. We feel this’ll prove to be a sustainable price point and we want our customers to reap the benefits of TypeIt4Me’s strong performance in the new Mac App Store.

The recent launch of the Mac App Store has generated a fantastic buzz, opening up a world of opportunities for Mac users and developers alike. We’re tickled pink that TypeIt4Me – available since day one – has been featured in Apple’s Staff Favourites section in several countries for 3 weeks running now. It’s been enjoying phenomenal success in both the US and Europe and has been catapulted into the Top 10 of paid productivity apps in several territories worldwide.

It’s an absolute blast to see so many people discovering and enjoying our software – in many cases getting their first revelatory taste of just how much time and effort text expansion can save them. In the 22 years since we fired up version 1.0 of TypeIt4Me on an old black-and-white Macintosh SE/30 and brought it to market, we have never seen a rise in uptake quite like this. Not even after TextExpander, Typinator and others arrived on the scene and marshalled their considerable marketing resources to raise awareness of just how nifty typing utilities can be. The wave of enthusiasm with which our long-standing flagship product has been greeted by a new generation of Mac users is truly humbling. We’re not going to be breaking out the caviar and leafing idly through speedboat catalogues anytime soon, but this is certainly a most welcome turning point for us. We’re very grateful for the shot in the arm, Steve :)

…OK, it’s time to wrap this up before it gets too soppy and we ruin our make-up, but before we do we’d just like to extend our warmest thanks and appreciation to all our loyal customers – both early adopters and recent converts – for all the constructive feedback, encouragement and support. We hope TypeIt4Me has made your life that little bit easier and we look forward to improving your Mac experience further still over the years to come. Exciting times are afoot.

Cheers! *clink*

The Ettore Software team - striving to eradicate the tedium of keyboard input since 1989.

One of our customers has just kindly brought it to our attention that the good folk at Lifehacker have published a pretty comprehensive rundown of all the main text expansion apps currently available for the Mac. They looked at TypeIt4Me, Snippets, TextExpander and Typinator, comparing the pros and cons of each – and ultimately gave TypeIt4Me their seal of approval. We’re always keen to get some insight into users’ perspectives and The Mac Text Expansion Faceoff makes for interesting reading. Obviously we’re chuffed to bits that they declared TypeIt4Me their favourite. It’s always good to hear we’ve still got it after all these years :)

Hello. Today we released another update to TypeIt4Me – these are the release notes.

New or changed features:

• Added ~ and ` to triggers in response to TappingBPP’s comment on US Mac App Store.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that could potentially lead to saving clipping edits over contents of another abb.
• Fixed crash when expanding in apps that don’t have the Edit menu.
• Restored “Strip ‘s’ for plurals” functionality.
• Restored showing of licensee name in About dialog.
• Now handles adding esc and nbs when clicking All in the Triggers preference tab.

This version is waiting for review at Apple so it probably won’t show up in the Mac App Store for a few days yet. If you bought direct from the Ettore Software website, select ‘Check for updates’ to install the update.

Apple has not yet provided a way for developers to transfer existing licences to the Mac App Store. Our intention, for now, is to continue publishing TypeIt4Me both directly via our website and via the Mac App Store.

The only difference between the two versions is that one handles registrations and updates via Sparkle, while Apple handles those things for us in the Mac App Store version.

The version 5.0.5(30) update became available through our website six days before appearing on the Mac App Store.