TypeIt4Me
Mac Tip #151/26-May-2004

Oh boy! There are things I have to type day in and day out. Long things. Short things. Tricky things.

And I’m not a good typist. I’m forever getting letters out of order: “teh” instead of “the”, “adn” instead of “and”, “Rahel” instead of “Rachel”.

TypeIt4Me (US$27) is an essential piece of software that sorts it all out for me — in emails, filling forms on the web, typing into half a dozen text editors.

If there’s a mistake I commonly make then I can add that mistake to a list, along with the correction. When I type the mistake and follow it with a customisable “trigger” TypeIt4Me automatically changes my “mistake” to its correct form.

So, if I type “Rahel” followed by a space (but without the speech marks) then TypeIt4Me automatically changes it to “Rachel”.

I could use this for longer texts as well. Let’s say I type a lot of letters and would like to start each one with an address, a date and a greeting. Of course I could use stationery for this, but I could also use TypeIt4Me.

First I type the text I want, select it and copy it. Then I go to the TypeIt4Me menu and choose to Add an Entry… . I choose a name for the entry. This will be the sequence of letters I type to call it up. For something like this I might choose “lhead”. be sure not to choose something you regularly type.

TypeIt4Me Edit Entries window.

If I choose to Edit Entries… I can also choose to add in a date. The screenshot shows me choosing the date format. TypeIt4Me inserts a special marker (in my case that’s [[1]] which reflects the date format). Every time you use the abbreviation TypeIt4Me will replace that code with the current date (or time, depending what you chose).

Download the software and try it out. If you decide it’s useful to you then pay the shareware fee. Then you can figure out how to spend the time you save yourself every day.