just an asterisk

From time to time, lifehacker does a fantastic job of writing a simple program that does what it is supposed to do. My favorite (that I admit, I didn’t really inspect in full when released) is Texter. Texter is a text replacement tool. Although you may not think you need one, consider the following examples:

1. Perhaps you sign every email with a signature specific to either work or play. For example, at work I use several different signatures dependent on the recipient. When Texter is running on my machine, no matter the client or browser, when I hit “asig”+{Enter} my work signature is placed in the email. This works in Gmail as easily as in Outlook.

2. Perhaps you write a very similar email to family and friends every time an event happens (ok this may not make you the best person, but you are considerably more efficient if you don’t retype things…). You type “Dear _, so sorry to hear about your snowmobile accident. Please tell your wife _ that if there is anything she needs to please call me at 555-4543”. Instead, you could just type “consolemobile” + {Tab} and it would write all of that! Then you could just fill in the names.

3. Perhaps you like to brainstorm using a template. For a SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunity, threats), maybe it makes sense to have the word “SWOT” + {Enter} result in this:

a. Strengths

i.

b. Weaknesses

i.

c. Opportunity

i.

d. Threats

i.

I know this has been a rather short introduction, but the limits of what you can setup are truly endless. I haven’t even touched the “advanced” part of the tool (which lets you perform keystrokes after a trigger is typed). Check out the Lifehacker link for more details. ~ab

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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