Textexpander review upgrade#
Textexpander review windows#

downloading a webpage, scraping some content and outputting the result). And it only supports AppleScript and Javascript, so forget doing something super advanced (i.e. Either way, it's sloooow at doing advanced scripting. Or maybe it's because of how it launches Apple's 'osascript' program. But TextExpander's expansion of Javascript-based snippets is ridiculously slow (about 5-10 seconds on a non-SSD, about 2-5 seconds on an SSD), which I guess is because it reads/writes some temporary files to disk and then reads the script output from that temp file. The most exciting new feature was support for Javascript in their snippets.

Textexpander review upgrade#

They charge high upgrade fees for barely any new features. Here are just some of the reasons TextExpander is awful: Even before the new price gouging, they'd still only have gotten 1 or 2 stars from me. I'm leaving this as a lowest-score review for many reasons. I'm a long-time (~4 years) user of TextExpander, and I've been unhappy with TextExpander even before the pricing change. the cost) and well in advance you can't expect people to pay for a product that has seen little development lately. But unless you communicate the reasons of this move in great detail (incl. I've decided that a subscription is not for me. But people are unhappy because advances in development have been smallish for quite some time, so that falls flat when it comes to reasons justifying the move to a subscription based model.Īnd why is the cost of maintaining TextExpander suddenly so much higher than it used to be? Employed too many people who expect to be paid (rightly so)? Are they all working in marketing?ĭon't get me wrong, I'm not angry.

I understand why developers are seeking a more constant and reliable flow of revenue. I've tried aText and it does pretty much all I need for a fraction of the cost.

So with every new one I need to reconsider which ones are really worth it.Ĭonsidering for what and how often I've used TextExpander, in my case it's not worth a subscription. What TextExpander (v5) does, it does well.īut these days so many companies/services want you to subscribe. The subscription-based pricing model is fine for me as I do prefer small improvements within months over many new features in yearly upgrades.Īccording to my personal TextExpander statistics, I saved about 56 hours in one year (19,000 snippets - 1,370,000 chars).

Development time for single features differs and may lead to longer upgrade-cycles. Therefore customers have to wait until all new features are developed and are ready for sale. Each new version has to include more than one new feature in order to be qualified as 'upgrade' and in order to be accepted by customers. Having read a lot of negative user feedback on Twitter about the subscription model, I am convinced, this step towards recurring payment makes perfect sense, because there is one big advantage for customers: constant improvement of the software.ĭevelopers usually support old versions (bug fixes) until a new release or big upgrade is ready for sale. This is no big deal for me, as I do not save confidential information in snippets. In other reviews I learned that snippets are stored on external servers without encryption. I fully recommend this upgrade for any multi-platform-user (Mac, iOS, Windows).

Textexpander review windows#

I am thrilled to see the TextExpander-magic on Windows, as I am forced to use Windows for work related tasks. I am a long-term user of TextExpander and just upgraded to the new subscription-based TextExpander 6. I can still use the old iOS app and iCloud syncing, which seems to work fine. But switching back to TextExpander 5 after 2 years with TE6 meant losing almost no features. It's a nice theory, and I've seen places that did it well (1Password seems like a good example). Moving to a subscription does _not_ guarantee that the development process will improve. Scroll back through the comments here and you'll see that people had been complaining about weak upgrades back to TextExpander 4's release. I can't think of a single meaningful feature that they have added in the two years since switching to a subscription service. Two years of TextExpander-as-service disproves this theory. Aside: quoting the comment below 'Having read a lot of negative user feedback on Twitter about the subscription model, I am convinced, this step towards recurring payment makes perfect sense, because there is one big advantage for customers: constant improvement of the software.