Hawk Wings » text

Snippets plugin for Google Quick Search Box

Tim Gaden — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:47:15 +0000

QuickSnippets is a new plugin for Google Quick Search Box (QSB) that adds basic snippet management to the utility’s toolbox.

It is easy to use and quite clever.

First get the plugin from the developer’s Github site.

Copy the plugin file to your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns/ directory, and restart QSB.

Then to add a snippet, all you need to do is activate QSB and type quicks and select the QuickSnippet Regist option:

Enter the trigger and the snippet itself into the dialog box:

I’ve found that cutting and pasting blocks of texts into the snippet box preserves the line breaks when they are activated later.

When you’ve entered all the snippet you want, dumping them into an email message or other document is easy.

Just activate QSB, and type the snippet’s trigger. The snippet appears in the list below:

Select it and hit Enter. All done!

Obviously it’s not TextExpander, but for a lot of people it might be all the snippet management you need.

QuickSnippets is freeware and comes with more copious instructions in English and Japanese. google, google quick search box, plugins, snippets, text, productivity, not apple mail, not mail.appSimilar Posts:

Curious Feature: Mail.app Subject URLs

Tim Gaden — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:54:47 +0000

Mail.app has a curious feature, which is interesting if not immediately useful.

If you put a URL in the Subject line of an email, and some text in the body of the message, Webkit (or whatever handles the text in Mail) turns it into hyperlink.

As pointed out in a tip on MacOSXHints , it doesn’t work if you leave the body of the message blank.

The result is a clickable subject in the delivered email:

It’s not clear to me how users could make use of this behaviour, especially since you need to put text in the body of the email to trigger the parsing, text which might as well be the URL itself.

Still, it’s something to blog about ;-) mail.app, apple mail, webkit, text, url, oddity, triviaSimilar Posts:

Restore Leopard Address Book’s power to dial and text

Tim Gaden — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:01:22 +0000

Nova Media has released version 2.0 of its Phone plugins software, which restores to Leopard users the lost ability to dial phone numbers and send text messages in Address Book. And not only that, but more widely across a range of apps.

Phone Plugins installs itself as a System Preference pane.

After installation, you need to hook up a mobile phone to your Mac via Bluetooth by following the simple instructions onscreen. It recognised my old Nokia E60 without a problem:

Then, when the connection is established, right-clicking on a contact’s phone number in Address Book produces two new entries in the contextual menu:

The text/SMS interface is nice and simple and gets the job done. It offers a running total of remaining characters and a spell-check option:

Clicking “Dial number with E60″ initiates a call on your mobile/cell (unsurprisingly!).

Both options are available outside Address Book, system-wide in the Services menu. Just highlight the number and select the option you want from Services (or, if you do this a lot, bind it to a keyboard shortcut with an app like Service Scrubber ).

Phone Plugins works with a list of supported phones which Nova Media provides so check that yours is on the list before you try to install it.

Phone Plugins is shareware and features a very robust nag screen.

It costs €9,95 (c. USD 15.50) and a demo version is available from Nova Media’s web site .

For a donation-ware option, take a look at the emitSMS Widget in an earlier Hawk Wings post.address book, dialing, phone numbers, text, sms, contacts, mobile phones, cell phones, leopard, appleSimilar Posts:

Leopard Mail’s clever HTML formatting

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:42:07 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints points out how much smarter Leopard Mail is at handling content from the web which is pasted into its messages from web browsers.

For example, say you want to share someone’s overall top artists from Last.fm:

Block the content you want to send, and then drag it to a message in Mail.app, and behold:

Mail does a pretty good job of preserving the HTML formatting, even keeping the links and tool tips alive. It even provides a “widget-like” black boundary and cross for quick removal of the HTML block if you change your mind about sending it.

There are two things to note here. First, this works much better if the message is set to Rich Text Format. I live in a Plain Text world, so didn’t notice this at first. But perhaps only fuddy-duddies like me think it is more polite to send a link to the page.

Secondly, it works even better if you apply the “quicker text dragging” hack. Of course, this speeds life up all across Mac OS X, but also in this case.

Cocoa-based apps (Mail.app, Safari, etc) require by default that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a second before dragging.

You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100

This will reduce the delay to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

It modifies a string in the .GlobalPreferences.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences folder:

You could edit it manually in Plist Editor, as seen here, if you have an aversion to the Terminal, although you will need to use an app like Leopard Cache Cleaner to reveal Leopard’s “hidden files” first.

You will, of course, need to restart the apps for the change to take effect.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, safari, cocoa, text, html, rich text formatting, tipsSimilar Posts:

HTML snippet file for TextExpander

Tim Gaden — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:32:17 +0000

20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.

I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.

Luckily TextExpander saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.

With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)

The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.

When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to . As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.

You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.

TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, saving time, text, HTML, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts:

Spell Catcher X Lite: Faster, cleaner, cheaper typing and snippets

Tim Gaden — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:59:15 +0000

Evan Gross has released a “lite” version of his excellent Spell Catcher X utility.

Spell Catcher X is a multi-facetted app that offers interactive spelling correction, text snippet management, a substantial array of text manipulations (smarten the quotes in a selection or strip white space, for example) and more.

See Bob LeVitus’ review of Spell Catcher X on MacObserver (“Who Kneads Spill Chicken?” ) more more.

The most-used SCX feature on my MacBook Pro is the interactive spell-checking, which not only detects errors as you make them, but offers suggestions on what you meant to type:

Wonderful stuff. This alone pays for the cost of the app within a month.

The Lite version shaves USD 10 off the price of the full version. For that reduced price you have to make do without the interactive auto-completion of words you are typing, the Ghostwriter feature which saves text as you type for recovery in case of disaster and the text manipulation features.

Also, it only supports US English and the additional extra-cost language modules. The other six “default” languages won’t work.

Evan has produced a detailed list of differences .

The full version of Spell Catcher X costs USD 39.95; the Lite version USD 29.95. Both of them and a demo are available from Evan’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, text, spell checking, productivity, text snippets, working faster smarter betterSimilar Posts:

Faster text dragging in Cocoa apps (like Mail)

Tim Gaden — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:18:11 +0000

By default Cocoa apps handle dragging and dropping text in an annoying way. You have to click and hold selected text for a bit before you can drag it. You can’t remove this annoyance, but a Terminal hack can reduce the frustration.

John Gruber drew attention to this over the weekend at the C4 Developers Conference in his presentation on “Consistency vs. Uniformity in UI Design”.

Carbon apps (AppleWorks, Microsoft Office, TextWrangler, etc) require no delay. Select. Drag. No Problems.

Cocoa apps (Mail.app, Safari, Mellel , etc) require that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a moment before dragging.

You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100

This will reduce the delay from the one second default to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

You will, of course, need to restart the apps for the change to take effect.

In the past, I often got caught out by this in Mail.app, and ended up having to select the text I wanted twice. Not any more!

[Problem via TUAW , solution via Rob Griffiths at macOSXHints]mail.app, apple mail, cocoa apps, carbon, drag and drop, text, annoyance, appleSimilar Posts:

Textexpander 1.4: Flexible delimiters, old logo

Tim Gaden — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:24:07 +0000

TextExpander, formerly known as Textpander and my third favourite time-saving app in Mail.app and elsewhere, has been updated.

The new version includes an option to use the old Textpander menubar icon, which according to the release notes has “quite a few vocal fans”.

User-definable delimiters (the keystroke which triggers the expansion) help you to simplify your workflow:

For example, I currently use spacebar for TextExpander expansions and the tab key for TextMate snippets. I could now change the TextExpander delimiter so that my “muscle memory” only has to remember one key for all expansions.

TextExpander 1.4 also offers better importing of snippet lists and the ability to sort snippets by the date they were created or last modified.

TextExpander is shareware (USD 29.95) is available from the developer’s web site .productivity, mail.app, apple mail, snippets, text, textpander, textexpanderSimilar Posts:

TypeIt4Me 3.0: Loads of new features

Tim Gaden — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 11:40:28 +0000

TypeIt4Me is a snippet and text expansion utility like TextExpander (once Textpander).

These utilities speed up the typing in Mail.app and elsewhere to an unbelievable degree, and save me more time than anything else except, perhaps, Quicksilver.

Version 3.0 which was released yesterday is a major update. It is now a universal binary and its user interface has been completely rewritten in Cocoa.

Major new features include support for Rich Text Format in snippets and the clever ability to make individual snippets active only in particular apps.

The interface is clear and can be grasped as once by anyone who has used TextExpander. The preferences pane shows some of the app’s other features:

It can now import clippings files from TextExpander and Typinator and offers nested snippets, the ability to wrap the contents of the clipboard within a snippet improved support for images in snippets and more.

Devoted productivity nuts will be glad to know that they are no longer restricted to 2,700 abbreviations.

I noticed something else excellent straight away; TypeIt4Me does not suffer the occasional one or two second delay that afflicts TextExpander. Nice.

TypeIt4Me is shareware (USD 27) and a 30 day unlimited demo is available from the developer’s web site .snippets, text, productivity, typing, give your fingers a break, textexpander, typeit4me, text expansion Similar Posts:

TextExpander bargain today on MacZOT!

Tim Gaden — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:18:11 +0000

One of my very favourite time-saving, finger-sparing, productivity-boosting apps is on sale at MacZOT! today.

You can pick up a copy of TextExpander, the text snippet manager, at a 33% discount.

Nothing else helps me whip through my inbox as quickly (I don’t use MailTemplate) or manages my signatures as well in Mail.app and elsewhere.

On sale. Just for today. USD 19.95 instead of USD 29.95.

Drop everything. Go get it .

[Thanks, Marcel]textexpander, productivity, snippets, apple mail, mail.app, text, shortcuts Similar Posts: