TextExpander

Best Mac Bundle: save up to 90% on Parallels, 1Password, TextExpander + 5 more apps

If you or someone you know owns a Mac and could benefit from apps like 1Password or TextExpander, you're going to want to check out this promotion from the folks at Parallels. It's called the Black Friday Mac App Bundle, and it can save you up to 90% on 8 top-shelf Mac apps and services.

Included in this package is Parallels Desktop 12, which allows you to run Windows and other operating systems on your Mac, the popular password management app 1Password (the latest 'Families' edition), and key shortcut creator TextExpander. We have a full breakdown of the apps below.

How to use TextExpander to quickly insert keyboard symbols on Mac

You may have noticed how I like to use keyboard symbols in my posts. You know, things like ⇧, or ⌃, or ⌘, or even ⌥. I use → a lot too, which is helpful when laying out a certain order of steps in my tutorials.

Some of you may think that I've memorized the code for these symbols (I haven't), or that I copy and paste them from a document or keep them on my clipboard somehow (I don't). Instead, I use the venerable TextExpander utility to make inserting these symbols a totally effortless affair.

TextExpander shows off its iOS 8 keyboard with snippet expansion coming this fall

TextExpander has posted details about its upcoming "touch 3" update, that will add a TextExpander keyboard within iOS 8 that will allow users to expand snippets of text in any app on the iPhone or iPad. This marks yet another app developer taking advantage of Apple's new third-party keyboard API made available in iOS 8. Prior to the big update, only apps which implemented the TextExpander touch SDK could expand snippets directly.