News

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

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!

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.

We released TypeIt4Me 5.0.5 (30) a few minutes ago, just in time to see in the New Year… in New Zealand’s timezone :-)

You can peruse this page if you want to find out what’s new:
http://ettoresoftware.com/download/Release-Notes30.html

Or this one to check out how our Kiwi friends are celebrating the start of 2011:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12097984

Wishing you all the very best for 2011,

Riccardo and the rest of the crew at Ettore Software.

TypeIt4Me 5.0.4(28) released today now includes the Spanish localisation. If you are already running 5.0.x, just ‘Check for updates’ and you will be able to download this free upgrade.

¡Esperamos que disfrute!

Coming 24 hours or so after the 1.1 released on November 14, this .1 update fixes a number of minor bugs reported by users. If you find more or simply have suggestions for further improvements, please leave a comment here or email support@sounds4fun.ettoresoftware.com

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just put the finishing touches on the French localization of TypeIt4Me – or Mactylo as it’s known on the other side of La Manche – which will be available for download today.

The good news doesn’t end there; our Spanish-speaking friends can look forward to El TypeIt4Me joining it very soon. Stay tuned, amigos.