Section 81. Useful Utilities

81. Useful Utilities

After I switched, I discovered several Mac-only utilities I now depend on every day.

TextExpander (www.smileonmymac.com, $29.95, as seen in Figure 34) saves keystrokes by expanding user-defined abbreviations into text you specify. (Example: simply typing sig can summon your standard email signature.) After installation, unlike AutoComplete on the PC (which works only in browser address bars and fields and MS Office), it works in every Mac OS X application on my computer.

Figure 34. TextExpander speeds typing by replacing user-selected abbreviations with passages of saved text. It works in every OS X application.

iClip (www.inventive.us, $19.95) enhances the Cut/Copy/Paste clipboard, enabling me to save text, sounds, images, and movies in a screen-side clipboard recorder. I can drag and drop these (and other frequently needed clippings) into any Mac program.

Growl (www.growl.info, free) interacts with dozens of Mac programs, notifying me of everything from the arrival of email to the successful uploading of a blog post.