Product Reviews

Typinator is a productivity enhancer that replaces user-defined keystrokes with text. So if you regularly type, say, 'Photoshop' or 'Adobe Illustrator', Typinator will allow you to enter 'ps' or 'ai' instead (or the abbreviation of your choice), and will automatically expand the words.

There are a number of utilities which perform a similar function, but Typinator adds a few additional tricks that makes it stand out from the crowd. It comes with a built-in dictionary that automatically corrects common typing errors - 'adn' for 'and', for example, as well as the common error of missing the apostrophe key: so type 'aren;t' and it will be corrected to 'aren't'.

Shortcuts may be defined as having to be entire words, so that 'ps' will expand to 'Photoshop' if there's a space after it, but 'lapse' won't expand to 'laPhotoshopse';

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or as just the beginnings of words, so if you regularly forget that there are two m's in accommodation, 'accomo' will correcly expand 'accommodating' as well. Shortcuts can also be set to be case-dependent, in which case 'PS' won't expand to 'Photoshop' but 'ps' will; and there's an option which makes the expansion follow the case of the shortcut, so that 'don;t' will expand to 'Don't' or 'don't' as appropriate.

New to Typinator 2 is the ability to embed images in its clippings. So if you regularly finish your letters with 'yours sincerely, John Smith', you can use a simple abbreviation such as 'ys' to add the text, correctly spaced, together with a scan of your signature in the right place.

Other new features are the ability to paste from the clipboard, and to position the cursor at the appropriate place in an expansion. This is particularly useful within bulletin boards or forum websites, where code is needed to refer to files and to format the text: a two-letter shortcut could type [url=http://image.jpg][b][/b][/url], where 'image.jpg' would be pasted from the clipboard, and the cursor positioned between the two [b] instructions. Typinator can now also use shortcuts on a per-application basis, to avoid possible conflicts.

Lightning fast in operation, Typinator is easy to set up and enjoyable to use: its interface is completely intuitive. A tremendous productivity booster.