TextExpander 7
15 years ago, the small team of developers at Smile acquired the core product we now know and love called TextExpander. In those 15 years, we’ve been through many iterations and changes to the product, and our small team has expanded to almost 40 team members.
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Enhanced Snippet Suggestions make it even easier to notice and create Snippets from frequently-typed words and phrases.
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The app now shows you how to resolve conflicts with your Snippet abbreviations in a clear, easier-to-use interface.
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You can now view search results by group, and adjust how your search results are sorted and presented to quickly find what you need.
Pricing is unchanged.
Previously:
- PDFpen Acquired for $6 Million
- TextExpander by Subscription One Year Later
- TextExpander Adjustments
- TextExpander 6 and TextExpander.com
9 Comments RSS · Twitter
When they switched pricing I stopped using them. Since then I've been using aText (5$). I still get bug fixes. But there are no new features.
So what are the 40 persons doing for such a tiny small app?
When they switched pricing, I discovered that Alfred (which I already used) supported snippet expansion.
Same as the previous 3 comments. The subscription model made no sense to me. I kept on using the previous version for a while and eventually stopped using the app altogether.
macOS supports expansions, Alfred also does and offers additional features, but I decided to use Typinator (https://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/) instead. It offers a number of additional features that I needed and could even import my expansion sets from TextExpander.
When they switched pricing, I kept using 5.1.6. Amazingly it still works for me in Big Sur without any probems. Hopefully that will be true in the upcoming macOS as well.
I mitgrated most simple snippets to Alfred over the years. Works really well and is even more convenient than the old TextExpander thanks to the great snippets browser.
I have a handful of snippets which use the tab key to fill out long web forms. Haven't figured out a way to recreate them in Alfred yet.
"So what are the 40 persons doing for such a tiny small app?"
I'm pretty sure 40 is just the number of people Smile employs, not the number of people working exclusively on TextExpander. This includes management, HR, visual designers, UX designers, marketing, writers, developers, and so on. They're also maintaining two reasonably big products, so it doesn't seem like an unreasonably high number.
> They're also maintaining two reasonably big products
One — they've sold PDFpen (https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/07/05/pdfpen-acquired-for-6-million/).
I'm guessing a third if not more is sales staff.
Huh, then I guess that is a lot of people for one relatively small product. I wonder if they sell a lot of enterprise licenses and need a big sales staff. Or maybe they're using that 6 million to launch another product.
I wish it had stayed “TextPander”, and Peter Maurer (of Butler fame, https://manytricks.com) had kept this program … I’ve never seen anything but excellent (and beautiful = cleanly designed) applications coming from him … but this sale probably was what allowed him to switch careers and found Many Tricks.
When they switched pricing, I stopped using them. And then I found [Espanso](https://espanso.org/). Open Source, cross platform, and I can sync my snippets across all of my machines with Git.