Sponsor: Smile

I have the honor of being directly sponsored by Smile this week. In addition to being great people, as the creators of TextExpander, TextExpander touch, PDFpen for OS X, and PDFpen for iPad and iPhone, Smile is one of my favorite groups of developers.

My favorite and most-used tool from Smile is TextExpander, which I’m sure you’ve heard me mention before. It can rapidly replace short snippets of text with anything you want, from canned email replies to dynamic snippets of text, images, even shell or AppleScript output (for the nerdy among us). The new fill-in feature even lets you adjust dynamic parts of the text from a popup menu before inserting it. To demonstrate, my friend David Sparks has put together a great video on the Fill-in feature.

TextExpander touch brings all of this fun to iOS (and syncs snippets with your Mac), and there are a ton of apps which support it. The list keeps growing¹.

I have a slew of my own snippets and experiments for TextExpander available in the te-snippets tool. My current favorite is the Make A Date snippet, which turns natural language text (thursday 3pm) into formatted dates. There are plenty of tricks to try out, though!

PDFpen for iPad (and for iPhone!) is also an amazing productivity tool. If you receive contracts or forms via email, you can sign and return them directly from your iPad without having to print or fax anything. You don’t have to remember an error you saw in a document until you get back to your computer, either; you can fix typos and correct documents on the go.

Like its desktop companions, PDFpen for iPad has great annotation tools. Add notes, highlighting, and other markup right from your iPad. It syncs with your Mac via iCloud or Dropbox, and works with Evernote, Box and Google Drive.

Check out all of Smile’s great products, you won’t regret it!