How To Use Automated Typing On Your Mac

One of the most valuable classes I took in high school was typing. It’s not that typing on your Mac—email, reports, documents—is difficult.

With so many fingers and keys and keystrokes there is plenty of room for error. Wouldn’t it be great to have your Mac become an automatic typing machine? Dream on.

In the meantime, Typinator is the automatic text software which makes you type better and faster.

Like it or not, typing is an activity which is filled with many repetitive tasks. It’s not just the alphabet or numbers that we repeat. We also repeat the same phrases over and over.

All that effort takes, well, extra effort. We type the same words, same phrases, same addresses, same salutations, over and over and over again. If computers are so smart, how come they can’t figure out what I want to type and type it for me?

Well, probably because computers are not all that smart. However, with Mac software such as Typinator, your Mac gets a little smarter, types with more accuracy, and saves you more than a few keystrokes.

Typinator is dubbed automatic text software. If you type on your Mac then your efficiency, accuracy, productivity can be enhanced with Typinator. How? It automates the typing of frequently used text and auto corrects typing errors.

Think of Typinator as an abbreviation machine. Define an abbreviation, attach a string of text, a word, a phrase, or a whole paragraph to the abbreviation (even a graphic image or photo).

Then, while you’re typing, enter the abbreviation and Typinator fills in the rest of the word or phrase, phrases, or paragraphs. It’s a good way to drop in signatures, boilerplate phrases, customer service responses—anything that requires repeated typing.

Specific symbols, computer code, odd characters can all be set to an abbreviation and typed automatically.

Since we live in the days of on-the-fly spell checking, spelling errors are a thing of the past, right? Wrong. I still manage to misspell words—the wrong word gets spelled correctly but placed in the wrong context.

Typinator can reduce your spelling errors, too, since it only types what you assign to the abbreviation.

I know what you’re saying, “All of this sound well and good, Alex, but what’s the catch?” Well, there is a catch. Any good utility requires a setup, and you’re mostly on your own when assigning words or phrases to your abbreviations.

There’s also a measure of discipline required to remember and begin using your abbreviations. That’s the toughest trick to master. However, once you’ve been using Typinator for even part of a day, you start to see the value, and create and use even more abbreviations.

Auto correction is a big part of typing these days. Word processing tools tell us when some word we typed isn’t spelled correctly. Typinator also accepts and uses the AutoCorrect Dictionary from TidBits.

You get the best of two worlds. Auto correction when you type, and a way to type faster than you actually type. More accuracy. Less time. $27. Very cool for Mac users who are on the keyboard constantly.