Good news, iOS power-nerds! TextExpander Touch 2.0 has just been released into the wilds of the App Store and is available for your keystroke-saving delectation.
The big news? Fill-In snippets finally come to iOS. But that’s not all…
Save time and customize repetitive responses with fill-ins for single lines of text, multiple lines of text, popups, and optional text sections. Make responding a breeze.
TextExpander is an essential app for anyone who does anything resembling work on an iDevice. Type a few letters and – ping! – they’re expanded into pretty much anything textual: an e-mail address, a block of HTML, a paragraph of boilerplate. But until today, the iOS version fell far short of the powerful OS X version.
New in 2 are fill-ins. These let you trigger a chink of text with optional gaps that you can fill in as you go. Thus, you could have a standard reply for a certain e-mail enquiry, and have a fill in for the name of the sender.
Fill-ins can be multi-line, single line or even present you with a pop-up list of pre-selected options. The rub is that you’re whisked off to the TextExpander app to do this, and then sent right back to where you started when you’re done. Then again, constantly opening TextExpander at least triggers it to sync with your Mac version (assuming your do this), keeping all snippets up to date.
The snippet creation tools are also much improved, with cursor positioning, date and time math ("three days from now", etc.), and even something called "Selection Range," which sends you back to your source app with a chunk of the expanded text selected, ready to be typed over or copied.
It’s a great improvement, and I’m busy thinking up ways I could use the new features (despite trying to go back to the Mac I still do most of my work on an iPad mini). If you don’t already on it, TextExpander is $5.
