Frequently Asked Questions

TypeIt4Me Touch is an iOS / iPadOS notepad app with built-in text expansion. Text expansion is essentially on-the-fly substitution of short typed abbreviations with longer ‘snippets’ of content, which can include lengthy words, phrases, boilerplate texts, or date/time stamps. When you type a custom shorthand abbreviation of your choosing, TypeIt4Me Touch will instantly replace it with a corresponding snippet that you’ve defined, without missing a beat.

Find yourself typing the same phrases and paragraphs over and over? Build up a set of abbreviations and the full text snippets that they represent. TypeIt4Me Touch will save you time and keystrokes by automatically expanding your abbreviations as you type your notes. As a bonus feature, it comes with a(n onscreen only) keyboard extension that you can quickly switch to when typing in other apps. You can use this to access and insert your longer snippets and boilerplate texts when and where you need them.

TypeIt4Me Touch on iPhone and iPad can even share snippets with TypeIt4Me for Mac (a related product, available separately). Text snippets created in TypeIt4Me on a Mac and stored in iCloud will be usable in TypeIt4Me Touch on your iPhone or iPad – and vice versa.

The latest version of TypeIt4Me Touch requires at least an iPhone 5 or iPad Air running iOS 11 or newer. We strongly recommend updating your iOS to the most recent version available for your device.

TypeIt4Me Touch 3 comes with a bonus on-screen keyboard extension that will expand your abbreviations almost anywhere, even when you’re not typing in the TypeIt4Me Touch app itself. All you have to do is install it, grant it the permissions it needs and then use the keyboard switcher to bring it up as and when you need it.

Please note, however, that Apple doesn’t allow TypeIt4Me Touch to work with connected hardware keyboard accessories when you’re typing outside of the TypeIt4Me Touch notepad app itself.

As a result, the TypeIt4Me Touch experience won’t be quite the same as what you may be accustomed to if you also use our related TypeIt4Me app on the Mac platform. The limited extensibility offered in iOS and iPadOS does *not* allow us to seamlessly ‘hook in’ to the native keyboard the way TypeIt4Me is able to on the Mac. There is no handwriting recognition or swipe-to-type and the excellent corrective and predictive features of Apple’s QuickType,  are not available while the TypeIt4Me Touch keyboard is active. Your mileage may vary and you may find that to avoid making mistakes you need to take greater care when typing.

The TypeIt4Me Touch extension supports latin character sets and includes [optional] autocorrect for English, French, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

The following keyboard layouts are offered:

• QWERTY (EN)
• QWERTY (SV)
• AZERTY
• QWERTZ

Greek, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other languages are not yet supported.

You can if you wish, but we don’t recommend it. TypeIt4Me Touch is not intended for use as a permanent replacement for the built-in Apple keyboard. Ettore Software is not a multi-billion-dollar company with R&D resources to match those that went into producing Apple’s predictive text, handwriting recognition and swipe-to-type algorithms. Our keyboard extension is unlikely to speed up regular typing like the related TypeIt4Me app does on a Mac. Rather, TypeIt4Me Touch’s add-on keyboard is best viewed as an adjunct for use alongside the Apple keyboard. You can temporarily call it up at the press of a key for convenient access to longer TypeIt4Me snippets (including those created on your Mac and stored in iCloud). It can be very useful when you need to quickly insert multiple lines of text or even multiple paragraphs, such as frequently used boilerplate emails.

TypeIt4Me Touch is available on the App Store for a one-time payment of $4.99 (USD) / £4.49 / 5,99€.

No. TypeIt4Me for Mac and TypeIt4Me Touch on iOS / iPadOS are related but separate products that do different things. If you wish to use both you will need to purchase both separately.

iCloud sync

If you move a snippet set to iCloud, it will be available on all your iCloud-enabled iOS devices straight away. It’ll also appear in “Sets in iCloud” in TypeIt4Me 6.x.x for Mac and the Mac App Store version of TypeIt4Me.

Syncing with your iPhone or iPad via iCloud is not available in TypeIt4Me version 5.5.x or other older versions for Mac. This is because until recently Apple would only permit apps sold via its App Store to use iCloud. You may want to consider updating if you haven’t yet done so.

Manually copying files

If iCloud sync is not an option for you, you can also email or AirDrop a .typeit4me snippet set file created on your Mac to your iPhone or iPad and open that in TypeIt4Me Touch.

When typing within the TypeIt4Me Touch notepad app itself, yes, you can use a physical hardware keyboard accessory. However, like other third party keyboards, the TypeIt4Me Touch keyboard extension that you can bring up inside other apps will only work when you type directly on the screen (e.g. with your finger or an Apple Pencil). This is a limitation of the iOS / iPadOS platform.

The term “snippet” refers to the full text that your abbreviation represents.

Snippets (i.e. the text that expands when an abbreviation is triggered) can be up to 32,000 characters long.

No, this is not yet supported on the iOS / iPadOS platforms. We do hope to be able to offer this in future, though.

If you have auto-correct and / or auto-capitalisation switched on in your main iOS settings, this can interfere with TypeIt4Me Touch expansion. To prevent snippets coming out garbled, with part of the snippet repeated, try turning auto-correct and auto-capitalisation off in Settings > General > Keyboard.

In TypeIt4Me, a snippet “set” is a file that contains a group of TypeIt4Me snippets. These sets enable you to organise and keep different groups or types of snippets separate, if you’re so inclined.

Many people use just a single set containing all of their snippets and that’s perfectly fine. Others like to switch between several different sets, each suited to a particular context. Here are a few examples of how you might use sets:

• Switch between an “Office set” and a “Home set”.
• Maintain a secondary “Spanish snippets” set for when you’re typing in that language.
• Keep a separate “Code snippets” set that you only use when you’re programming.

Yes, you can. Just tap on the switch next to a set’s name to toggle it on or off. Or you can just swipe right across the set’s name to enable it.

On the face of it, it may appear that TypeIt4Me Touch merely replicates functionality already present in iOS. This is not the case. While Apple’s rudimentary support for text shortcuts is helpful it doesn’t afford the level of sophistication that TypeIt4Me Touch offers. The two do operate on the same principle, so  there is some overlap in their functionality. However, beyond the similar mechanics they are quite different.

iOS keyboard shortcuts are more suitable for quickly writing something relatively short. In contrast, the value of TypeIt4Me Touch lies in the fact that it’s designed for drafting (and re-using) longer notes. It also makes it easier to manage perhaps thousands of text snippets and keep them in sync across multiple devices. Furthermore, TypeIt4Me Touch can generate several paragraphs at a keystroke and automatically insert sophisticated, highly customisable date and time stamps. Snippets can also be organised into separate sets for use in different contexts. Finally, it’s worth noting that if you’ve been using TypeIt4Me on a Mac for a while it’s nice to be able to quickly port 30 years’ worth of accumulated abbreviations over to your iDevices. We’d go crazy if we had to manually recreate all our TypeIt4Me abbreviations in the cramped iOS keyboard settings pane.

To summarise: iOS keyboard shortcuts and TypeIt4Me Touch do similar things but one does not render the other redundant. They actually complement each other rather nicely. The keyboard shortcuts feature built into iOS is a helpful tool. You’ll most likely continue to use it for firing off quick notes, filling in forms in Safari and such. When you need more functionality, however, TypeIt4Me Touch will cater to your power user needs.

Don’t worry, TypeIt4Me Touch is not a keylogger in the scary sense. While it does have to log keystrokes to do its job, these keystrokes are never saved or sent anywhere. Moreover, the app empties its cache every time you press the spacebar. Thus, it hardly ever remembers more than 20 characters of what you most recently typed.