Software Review :: Typinator

July 30, 2007

Whether you’ve ever spent considerable time clacking at your Mac’s keyboard or not, you’re bound to find out that you may be typing the same things over and over. That’s where apps like Typinator come in. Typinator is designed to save you valuable time by taking simple characters and expanding them into full-blown sentences or whatever you find yourself repeating. Let’s take a closer look.

Design. Its interface basically consists of one window where you store your defined character bundles and what they’ll be expanded to. It’s super easy to configure Typinator, and you can even organize them into groups or even print them out for external reference. After you’ve left everything set in Typinator, you can close the window and let it run in the background. In my tests, I never found Typinator consuming considerable system resources or interfering in any way — so it’ll let you do your work in peace.

Functionality. When you type a character set you listed, Typinator will automatically expand it into what you defined it to be. For example, I could have set Typinator so that when I type “brb” it expands it to the full “be right back”. It’s just a matter of how you set it up — you choose the character combination, if the case must match, and if the whole word matters. It works perfectly, and across different apps where you input text. Also, instead of plain text, the app allows you to expand the characters into formatted text or even an image. As a last great bonus, Typinator also has a neat feature that lists common misspelled words, and automatically corrects them. For example, if you typed “desision”, it is automatically corrected to “decision”. And even though the auto-correction lists have a lot of words (even in French and Deutsch!), you know your mistakes better than anyone — so feel free to add more words to be auto-corrected.

Limitations. No matter how hard I looked, or how many times I circled around it, I found none — Typinator works as expected from it.

Final thoughts. To sum it up, Typinator is a must-have. It’s a perfect addition to your Mac and great work enhancer — definitely worth its 20 euro price tag. As a side-note, I’m happy to announce that my email answering days are bound to be done much quicker.