One of THE most useful programs for the Mac. I switched from TypeIt4Me about a month ago, and now use Typinator all day, every day.


Typinator is fantastic for:

+ Correcting commonly misspelled words (such as "teh" for "the")

+ Shortening common words, phrases, and names that you type a lot

+ Typing email signatures and tag lines, phone numbers, addresses, HTML snippets, etc.

+ Simplifying long or difficult-to-spell words, phrases, and names.


Favorite features:

+ User-editable spelling correction in 3 languages.

+ Multiple expansion lists. If expansions cause problems in some programs (such as curly quotes in email apps), set up a second list with alternates.

+ Allows you to position the cursor anywhere in the expansion. Handy for typing the name at the beginning of a letter, or content in a block of HTML or computer code.

+ Expands on typing ANY non-alphanumeric character, including a few that TypeIt4Me ignores (including ellipses and em [long] dashes).

+ Free of expansion glitches that plagued TypeIt4Me (which were why I switched).

+ Can import TypeIt4Me shortcuts.

+ Friendly and responsive developer.


A TypeIt4Me user since 1995, I do miss a few features. Typinator has no shortcut for adding new expansions directly from the clipboard. There is no plural S setting, so you must add plurals individually. Expansions cannot delete the preceding character or expansion trigger (useful for typing the date into file names in the Finder.)

Having tried TypeIt4Me and SpellCatcher, I recommend Typinator.

I use this program hundreds of times a day. It's a HUGE time-saver. It will reduce your spelling errors, speed up your typing, and can make your life a lot easier.

The good news:

MacSpeech Dictate is VERY usable dictation software for the Mac. It is fast, accurate, easy to use, and takes under 10 minutes to set up and train. Wow!

Dictate is light-years better than iListen. If you discarded iListen because it wasn't usable, you should upgrade NOW.


The bad news:

Dictate is a far-from-complete early release. It doesn't have all its features yet (no spelling mode, no correction feature).

Dictate is still buggy. Mixing typing and dictation is a sure way to get Dictate confused and cause some really strange behavior. Especially since Undo is buggy, you will want to do FREQUENT saves. (I usually dictate into Note Pad, with frequent saves, and then transfer text to TextEdit or Bean.)

If you haven't used dictation software before, or if you already have a Naturally Speaking on Windows, you may want to hold off buying Dictate until some of the worst bugs get fixed.


It takes under 10 minutes to set up Dictate and start dictating text. Accuracy is excellent. There are some capitalization bugs, which result in occasional Words in the middle of sentences getting capitalized. A few times I've seen a random word gets UPPERCASED.

Dictate allows you to transcribe speech into its own Note Pad window, or directly into applications. (I mostly use the Bean word processor, as it is fast and simple, and can quickly switch text between smart and dumb quotes.)

The Note Pad interface is rather buggy. Typing into it only works if your cursor is at the end; otherwise, letters tend to type backwards, and are directly attached to the previous word. Cutting and pasting cause Dictate to get confused, which will quickly scramble your text.

Dictate is very processor-intensive. You will want to turn off process-hogging applications while you work.

Teaching Dictate your vocabulary and writing style requires feeding the program TEXT or RTF documents, which it analyzes for vocabulary and word use patterns. Then you get to choose which words actually get added to the program's vocabulary. I'm a professional writer with a huge vocabulary, and fed it a huge amount of text, which took over an hour per profile. (I dictate using two different voices to rest my vocal chords.)

Documentation is decent.

Summary: Dictate is fast, accurate, and highly usable despite its quirks. If you have used dictation software before, especially iListen, Dictate is well worth getting. If not, you might want to wait one more rev for additional features and bug fixes.

Summary: Great backup, lousy restore

I just tested this software. It does a great job backing up, with lots of options. Backups can be native file format in a Finder folder hierarchy, so you can search them with any search utility. Iterative backups get made within the same folder hierarchy, in dated folders. It's fast. It's smart.

Unfortunately, Tri-BACKUP's restore functionality is, AFAICT, extremely limited. You can't simply tell it to restore a folder to how it was at last backup ... or at a given date in the past ... or how it was when some previous backup got made. Nope, you've got to manually page through a file list to decide which version of what gets restored. Since I have over 250,000 files in my Documents folder alone, plus a huge photo archive, restoring using Tri-BACKUP just isn't practical.

Too bad, because otherwise it's a nice program, and I've heard very good reports about its reliability.

For those of us who like pull-down text menus rather than icons (or who like aspects of the OS 9 interface), X-Assist provides an easy way to switch and hide applications, go directly to items within System Preferences rather than loading the main window, etc.

It's a bit slow, and it doesn't provide a list of windows open under each app as OS 9's application menu could be made to do. However, it does provide convenience, plus a visual cue as to which application is frontmost, something which can be confusing in X.

Also recommended: AppleMenu, TypeIt4Me.

Looks like it's dead. The download link gets an error page.