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A Few Words on Pricing, or “What Doesn’t Go Up…”

Hello again. Riccardo and I are happy to report we’re making headway responding to our mountain of emails. Last week it was big enough to blot out the sun, but now there’s just a partial eclipse. Thanks for bearing with us. If we haven’t answered your question yet, rest assured, we are closing in on it.

Pricey fruit

There’s a common refrain that’s cropped up a lot in the flurry of inquiries we’ve received this past fortnight. Many are hoping that, in light of recent developments, we might be tempted to offer a special low price as an incentive for disenchanted TextExpander users to switch to TypeIt4Me.

We don’t mind being asked; dad and I enjoy a good haggle from time to time and we are sympathetic to the plight of anyone who can’t afford the new monthly subscription for Smile’s TE6. That said, we hope you’ll understand we just had a month-long 75% off promotion in January to mark TypeIt4Me’s 25th birthday, so we’ve no plans to drop the price again for a while. As a rule, we reserve flash sales for celebrating milestones or special occasions. To be first to know about the next one, you could sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.

In response to our stance, some interested parties have floated the idea that to get around holding another sale so soon we could instead offer a temporary exclusive discount to TextExpander émigrés. We briefly considered something along those lines, but ultimately decided against it because it felt a little too predatory. We also didn’t want to unfairly discriminate against ‘regular’ customers who are new to the text expansion game.

Right now, leaving TypeIt4Me’s price unchanged seems like the right thing to do. We don’t want to hustle anyone into snapping up a special time-limited bargain while feelings are still running high, in case people later regret a hasty purchase. It’s long been our position that we’d rather not take anyone’s money until they’re really sure they want to commit to TypeIt4Me. You have a whole month to try it for free, guys: take your time and weigh up your options. If you like it and it saves you lots of keystrokes, we’d greatly appreciate a twenty dollar vote of confidence to encourage its continued development. We feel that at $19.99 TypeIt4Me represents decent value for money, and that it remains fairly priced in view of all the late nights and weekends we devote to supporting it.

…Wow, this has gone on a bit – sorry! We’ll wrap things up for now, but not before saying a very grateful hello and thanks to all the enthusiastic new customers who’ve just discovered us. Thanks, too, to all the loyal TypeIt4Me users who’ve stuck with us throughout the years. We really appreciate your kind words. It tickled us when a long-time fan informed us recently that according to her statistics our app has so far saved her over 12 hours of 2-finger typing – or as she put it: “almost enough time to binge-watch an entire series of Daredevil.” That’s what we like to hear. May TypeIt4Me free up lots more time for you to spend curled up with your loved ones watching a noble underdog in spandex pummel scary ninjas :)

-Guy

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On Subscriptiongate and other matters.

It’s been an eventful week. Over the last 7 days Smile Software’s recent controversial decision to migrate to a cloud & subscription-based model for TextExpander has been creating waves, to put it mildly. We had initially planned to just keep our heads down and our mouths shut, but our inbox is now overflowing with anxious emails seeking reassurance. We don’t want anyone to misread a tight-lipped response, so here goes: our view is that Smile’s new plan constitutes a bold move, albeit not one we would consider making ourselves.

Why not? Well, partly because we’ve no wish to raid anyone’s piggy bank on a monthly basis and partly because we’re a tiny, somewhat oldskool outfit. We’re also allergic to complicated legal admin. The thought of the security and privacy headaches being responsible for a cloud service would involve makes us break into a cold sweat. Then there’s the simple fact that we’re not enamoured with the idea of effectively renting apps to customers. The one-time $19.99 purchase with optional upgrades model suits us just fine and people seem happy enough with it. So if you’re a TypeIt4Me user alarmed by Smile’s new direction and worried we might follow in their footsteps, you can relax: that’s not going to happen.

…Now, how to put this? Aside from questions about our plans, there have been suggestions in some quarters that we must be lapping up the fallout from Smile’s announcement. Are we relishing the commotion? The answer is no. There’s no bad blood between us and Smile. We’ve enjoyed a cordial, healthily competitive relationship with them since around 2006, when they acquired Textpander from Peter Maurer – a gifted indie developer whose work we’ve always admired a great deal. At times, yes, we’ve envied Smile’s larger talent pool and the superior resources that ultimately enabled their dev team to outpace us. All the while, we couldn’t help but doff our caps, because they’re consummate professionals and we are indebted to them for popularising text expansion. Smile cannily leveraged sponsorship and used its affiliate relationships to introduce text expansion to the mainstream at a time when we simply weren’t equipped to do so. Throughout the years they and our other friendly competitors have motivated us to keep raising our game.

Far from rubbing our hands with schadenfreude, we’re mainly a bit spooked by some of the unbridled scorn being poured on a previously well-regarded team that’s successfully marketed a solid, dependable utility for years. Watching a decade’s worth of goodwill unravel in the wake of a surprise decision that alienated a lot of customers has been a sobering lesson that we need to tread carefully ourselves. So, as always, we’ll do our best not to disappoint anyone and just get on with making TypeIt4Me better.

To recap, then: there’s no cloud service or subscription pricing in our foreseeable future, we hope everyone at Smile is OK and we’re just going to carry on doing what we do. Our aim is to keep chiselling away at the rough edges of TypeIt4Me with each release so that it continues to gradually improve. We’re aware that it’s been showing its age; version 5.5 was the first step in our plan to do something about that. We still have quite a laundry list of features to add and refine, which ought to keep us busy and hopefully out of trouble for a while yet. We think you’ll like Version 6.0 when it drops, but its release is still quite a way off and there will likely be a couple of minor incremental updates before then. It takes us a while to design, develop, localize and test new features rigorously and we also have a couple of other irons in the fire to attend to. In the meantime…keep the requests and suggestions coming! We may not be able to cater to all of them, but we do like a challenge. Hope this has shed enough light on our thinking to put you at ease.

-Guy

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How to import TextExpander snippets into TypeIt4Me

Today there have been a few people asking us how to port their snippets from TextExpander to TypeIt4Me. For the benefit of any of you who may be flirting with the idea of switching, here’s a quick primer explaining how to go about opening your TextExpander snippets in TypeIt4Me.

  1. Open TextExpander and ctrl-click on a group of snippets.
  2. Select the Save a Copy of Group “[name]” option, saving the copy to your desktop.

    Save a Copy of your TextExpander group to the desktop

  3. Go to TypeIt4Me and click File > Open (or type cmd-o) to bring up an Open dialog. Navigate to the file you just saved to your desktop, select it and click Open. A Save As dialog will come up. Select the desktop as the target location and click the Save button. This will create a new TypeIt4Me snippets set on your desktop with the same name as your exported TextExpander file but with the extension .typeit4me.
  4. Double click on the new file. An alert will pop up informing you that it will be automatically moved to Application Support/TypeIt4Me/Sets.

    TypeIt4Me will display this alert. Click OK to import your snippets.

    Click Ok. Your snippets will be imported into TypeIt4Me and the set will appear in the Sets on this Mac pane.

    Successfully imported TextExpander snippets in TypeIt4Me

  5. Repeat the process for the rest of your TextExpander snippet groups until you’re done*.

 

*Please note that TextExpander Fill-in Field snippets work differently than their TypeIt4Me equivalent, Autocue placeholders. The import process will not automatically convert them; you will need to manually adapt any Fill-in Field snippets to use TypeIt4Me syntax or they won’t work when you type them. The TypeIt4Me user guide explains how to create autocue placeholder snippets.

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