Textpander -> TextExpander

Today, we released TextExpander 1.3, our first acquired product. A little background on the how/why:

A few months ago, I tried to donate US $30 to Peter Maurer, the author of Textpander and a medical student in Germany. I used his Textpander software every day to help answer customer support inquiries, to type URLs, and to sign my E-mails. I didn’t get a reply from Peter, so after some time I mailed his colleague to ask if he was okay. He was fine, had just waited to reply until he resolved the problem with PayPal, and so I made my donation. Then I asked Peter if he might consider selling us Textpander. Peter was amenable, so we reached an agreement, and the SmileOnMyMac team got to work on TextExpander 1.3.

We develop, market, and support software for a living, so we have the resources and the drive to take TextExpander forward. We adopted Peter’s unshipped improvements. We then added our own improvements, in particular the ability to create both plain and rich text snippets from the current selection via a System Service and to invoke that service from the TextExpander menu. We added an Italian version and we localized the help for the other non-English versions.

We have future plans for making TextExpander even more useful, and we’re working hard to spread the word. And we provide technical support . To date, we have answered all inquiries for all our products in under 24 hours, many much faster than that–and we know that people really appreciate that.

TextExpander, like all SmileOnMyMac products, is available as a free fully-functional demo download. For the first 30 days after installation, you’ll get a reminder of the hours that you’ve saved using TextExpander each time you save another hour. We think that, considering the value of one hour of your time, TextExpander is quite a bargain at US $29.95. If you continue to use TextExpander beyond 30 days, TextExpander will remind you to purchase more frequently, but still unobtrusively.

Some folks have complained that TextExpander is no longer free. The fact is, Textpander never was free. It was released as donationware. If you found the application useful, you were asked to donate money to Peter via PayPal. Less than 250 people ever made a donation. We’ll probably see half that number in purchases today, and we thank each and every one of you, as registered users give us the resources and motivation to improve TextExpander.

I hope you’ll download TextExpander and give it a try:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/download.html

If there are features you’d like to see, mail us:

textexpander@smileonmymac.com

We welcome comments from users (new, existing and potential) and we will continue to do our best every day to earn your custom.

Greg Scown
Co-Founder
SmileOnMyMac