I’ve been reading Merlin Mann’s blog on 43 folders for the past few weeks. He’s another person who’s a Getting Things Done devotee as well as a Mac guy. I’ve found all sorts of interesting things through his site and blog.

I read with interest the guest blog posting by Good Experience’s Mark Hurst, reviewing TypeIt4Me. (Other random linkage, Phil Terry, Good Experience’s CEO, is a fellow former PlanetAll guy).

I downloaded TypeIt4Me and I’m just blown away. It’s a smart text expander — you define a short piece of text and it automatically replaces it with a longer one.

It’s incredibly handy. I was looking at it and I found out it can do smart datestamps, so I defined “ds” as inserting a datestamp. I track everything through Tinderbox, and I’m constantly typing in the datestamps as I’m taking notes while working on my various projects. This little feature just saved me a minimum of 15 minutes every single day.

I also just defined a quicky Amazon one in which I define “amzn” as “http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos /ASIN/{ASIN}/jpbutlercom-20/” so that I don’t have to rewrite the long ugly URL string each time I want to point to a book on Amazon. Another few minutes each week saved.

When you come across software which so easily and elegantly solves a problem you have, you almost want to cry with joy. If you’re on a Mac (and why aren’t you?), you should go get TypeIt4Me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.