I get asked all the time how I can get so many things done. One of my favorite tools to help get things done is a text macro program on the Mac called TypeIt4Me.

Everyone who sits in front of a computer for extended periods of time or who answers a number of emails should have a text macro program. The idea behind a program like TypeIt4Me is that you type a short macro and it expands into a entire paragraph, letter, article template, etc.

So for example. For the Amateur Traveler I exchange email all the time with people about coming on the podcast. “What kind of questions do you ask?” is the most common query. My answer to that question is always basically the same. So in my email I type “atp-questions” and that expands to:

I do interviews by either phone or Skype (you need a computer and a headset). Generally an interview is about 30 minutes.

The kind of questions I usually ask
Why should someone go to XXX?
What were the highlights of your trip?
What should you see?
What do the guidebooks recommend that you think are a waste of time?
What do the guidebooks / tourists miss?
Where should you stay?
What should you eat?
How do you get around?
What side trips would you recommend?
What was the biggest surprise?

What I am looking for is travel information, but also personal travel stories that lend color commentary, that give us a flavor of a place.

If I want to mention press citations I type “atp-press” and it expands to:

—
•    1.5+ million travel podcast downloads in 2010
•    The Chicago Sun Times included the show in their list of 10 “Best travel sites”.
•    Oxford University uses the Amateur Traveler to teach English as a second language.
•    Men’s Journal says: “One of the 4 best adventure travel podcasts”
•    Best Life Magazine named the Amateur Traveler one of the 10 best podcasts on the internet.
•    Nominated for a People’s Choice Podcast Award in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
•    Popular Vote Winner for a Lonely Planet Blog Award 2009 in the Podcasting category
•    Named by tripbase.com as one of the 10 best looking/most accessible travel blogs on the internet
•    Named in a study as one of the “50 Most Influential Independent Travel Blogs”

I don’t have to type this yet again and as a bad typist and lousy speller I only have to proof-read my template once… or maybe twice.

I have macros for my site name, site url, email address, mailing address, a short bio, an Amateur Traveler episode post. The second time I need to type the same paragraph of information I make it into a macro instead.

There are other programs like Text Expander which have pretty much the similar functionality as TypeIt4Me. Both get good reviews, I use TypeIt4Me because it is the older program and I have used it for years.

1. Check Spelling While Typing – I can turn on a feature right here in my browser (Safari) to spell check as I go. Right click (or command click in a text area to bring up a menu. From the Spelling and Grammar menu select “Check Spelling While Typing”. Now as I type, words will be spell checked.
2. TypeItForMe – This wonderful tool can allow me to create aliases for frequently typed phrases like the name of my most popular podcast so that I can type “atp” and get “Amateur Traveler”.
3. TypeItForMe 4.0 – The latest version of TypeItForMe can also correct my simple typos as I go. If I type “tihs” I get “this”. It also has the ability to replace misspelled words.
4. Speech – I am bad editor. My brain tends to correct typos and grammar errors when I read. But I am a much better audio editor. You can have the Mac speak any section of text. From the Application menu (such as “Safari” from within the browser) select “Services” then “Speech” then “Start Speaking Text” to have your Mac read back to you the selected text.
5. Google – When in doubt remember that the google spelling dictionary is one of the better ones. If you can spell the word close to the correct spelling, Google might be able to get you the rest of the way.

To see these techniques in action, watch the attached video.

Oovoo is a new video chatting application that is available for Mac and Windows. It allows up to 6 people to have a video chat at the same time in a display that has been compared (by people like me who watched too much TV in their formative years) to the opening credits of Brady Bunch or the grid for Hollywood Squares.

My Oovoo Day was a cleaver marketing strategy to get promotional buzz for the software. The organizers of My Oovoo Day gathered a number of popular bloggers and podcasters and arranged for them to hold a series of chats. You could then sign up for one of up to 5 slots for each chat. As expected the bloggers and podcasters promoted the day. I signed up to chat with John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (and Accident Hash) and Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation. Because of problems with the My Oovoo Day event, I was only able to get into the chat with John Wall (the email confirmation apparently got eaten by my spam filter and you could neither cancel a registration nor register again to chat with the same person) but these were independent of the Oovoo software.

The event itself was interesting. I had not chatted with John before. The software was still pretty green. I was using a Mac and had to do an update to a new version on the day of the even before anyone could hear me. I crashed at least once so this still seems like Beta software. The audio worked well. The video did not keep up but that seemed to depend on the bandwidth of each user.

Bottom line, Oovoo is worth looking at for a small group video chat. The idea of doing an event like My Ooovoo Day is also worth looking at as a model of how to promote a new product, but… it would be better to wait until the product was a little more ready for prime time.

When I saw the MacBook Air at around 11 am I must admit I was impressed. “Still not the machine for me” I thought, but hey that keyboard does have a very good feel. i hope they release the support for gestures for use on my 15 inch MacBook Pro.

But now it is after 3pm and I have carried my MacBook Pro around the city last night on the 3+ mile hike from Moscone center to the Geek Brief meetup by the Fisherman’s wharf. I also have carried it around all day at MacWorld. Nothing like a sore back to make you see the advantage of a lighter machine. Will they sell any? I think so. Will there orders go up at the end of a long day at MacWorld? I think so.

Other things that I liked that I saw:

1Password was having a 50% off show special ($15) which was enough incentive to get me to buy their software that let’s you manage all your password/wallet information in an easy secure way.

Ubercaster is a podcasting platform that anyone podcasting on a Mac should at least take a look at. It is targeted towards people who do live shows.

The new version of TypeItForMe will include auto correction as well as more complex interactive templates. It would definitely be an upgrade that I would think about buying but since I bought within the last 18 months I will get it for free.

I talked to the developer of Call Recorder which I swear by for recording Skype calls/interviews. I learned that the version I already have has the ability to put in a sort of chapter marker.

Whoever at Microsoft had the idea of creating a blogger’s lounge is brilliant. Thanks for the chocolate, the ice tea and the hospitality.

If you have been living in a cave, twitter is a web based server that allows people to “micro blog”. You can enter any text that will fit in a 140 character limit. Twitter updates (or tweets) can also be delivered to your cell phone if you so desire. People twitter about blog articles they have written, what they have had for breakfast or words of wisdom as long as it fits in 140 characters. Many podcasters and bloggers have started to use twitter because you can send updates to a set of people who follow you but follow the updates, potentially, of a completely different set of people. I (my podcast is the Amateur Traveler) twitter at chris2x.

The best twitter updates I received (or wrote) the day before I wrote this article (which orriginally appeared on MacCast.com:

acedtect Happy Arbitrary Roman-derived change of annual enumeration.

leolaporte Turkish coffee and a flight to Aswan where we meet the Sun Boat IV. Sarkozy and Blair are in town, snarling the traffic.

chris2x just a thought, when Clark Kent gets new frames, does anyone recognize him?

scottsimpson For the record, a certain part of my anatomy has also been compared to a baby’s arm: my arm.

hotdogsladies GoDaddy’s checkout is like a hallway of Marines trying to hit you with a sock full of pennies. “Ow! Quit it! Don’t need ‘WebSite Tonight!!’”

CaliLewis “When we honor the potato, we honor ourselves.” Just heard it on NPR.

Ihnatko The fonts I bought from Comicraft for $20.08 each (with one freebie plus a $16 discount…details in post): http://tinyurl.com/3d36aq

And if those literary gems make you more interested in Twitter than as a Mac user one program that I would recommend is TwitterPod which has a clean interface and growl notification. It also highlights the last post you read (you can read URLs posted in a pop out panel) so it makes it easy to tell what posts are new.

Let the tweats begin.

A MacMania cruise is like a Mac conference at sea and more than one of the attendees had their attendance at conference paid for by their company (although only the most generous company will also pay for the cruise itself). The speakers on MacMania 7 were: Richard Dreyfuss (the actor), Janet Hill, David Pogue, Randal Schwartz, Jason Snell, Sal Soghoian, Derrick Story and Robin Williams (the Mac author not the actor). One of the wonderful perks of the cruise is being able to meet, talk with and generally shmooze with people who are well known in the Mac community.

The classes offered on MacMania 7 included:

• Introduction to Lightroom
• Introduction to Aperture
• iPhone: The Missing Manual
• Maximizing iPhoto
• Photoshop for Photographers
• Integrating Photoshop with Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto
• Which Is Best for You — Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto?
• iDVD and iMovie
• Apple’s Latest and Greatest
• The Ground Floor Guide to the Macintosh
• Extreme Googling
• Inside Mac OS X “Leopard”
• Leopard Power User Tips
• Introduction to iLife
• Pushing iLife to the Limit
• Amazingly Cool Utilities
• Personal Podcasting Primer

The classes are not held while the ship is in port so that attendees and speakers alike can enjoy shore excursions or just generally explore. MacMania 7 stopped at a prvate island in the Bahamas, Aruba, Curaçao, Panama and Costa Rica with the highlight of the cruise being the Panama Canal.

The cruise had more than 4 days spent entirely at sea. If you enjoy the normal ways to spend your time on a cruise: shuffleboard, bingo, art auctions, shopping, etc then a geek cruise may not be right for you. If you can’t imagine entertaining yourself on a 10 day cruise and think that spending the time with 150 other Mac fanatics would be fun, then you might want to look into MacMania 8.

Insight Cruises also ran Shakespeare at Sea on the same cruise (which is what I was officially attending but I was allowed to attend either program). More information about the cruise can be found in Amateur Traveler Episode 113 – Theme Cruise to Panama (Shakespeare at Sea / MacMania).

Let’s back up a bit and look at what this from Apple’s point of view. In general when Apple, or some other hardware company, releases a new product they are going through a product transition. So when they announce a new iPod they are trying to maximize how much money they make. A product transition has some risks for the company.

If they announce a product too soon and the product sounds very good then people may choose to stop buying the current product and wait for the new product. This is called the Osbourne Effect after Osborne Computer Corporation which pre-announced a series of new products in 1983. The company went out of business shortly there after and the most common story has been that their sales dried up when they announced these new machines. (Whether this actually caused Osbourne to go out of business is not universally accepted in retrospect, no one seems to argue that this was helpful to the company).

If a company still has old units in its warehouse when it ships the new product, these products will have to be sold for less money (or perhaps not sold at all). But, if the company guesses wrong how many of the old product it will sell in this transition and runs out of units in the warehouse then it may lose sales to a competitor. Combine this with a slip in the new product and you get the kind of scenario that can keep executives awake at night.

So why did Apple decide to pre-announce not one, but two products last year? The main reason would seem to be that they were not going through a product transition. They did not have a TV box when they pre-announced the AppleTV nor a cell phone when they pre-announced the iPhone. Why does this make a difference? The big difference here is that customers may in fact not buy some product that they were planning on buying and wait for the Apple product, but in this case it was not an Apple product. So with the iPhone, for example, what Apple wanted was for people to decide not to by that new BlackBerry, Blackjack, Razr, etc but to wait for the iPhone. What Apple did was create F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about their competitor’s products. They did not need people to pre-order the iPhone so much as they wanted them to at least wonder whether they should wait and see. FUD is a very useful marketing tool. If you don’t have something sell, marketeers are trying to at least get you to wait before buying a competing product. Their hope, which worked in the case of the iPhone, is that if you wait long enough they will have a product you will want to buy.

So, will Apple pre-announce the next iMac. That is unlikely. But if they get into yet another consumer product business then it is very likely that they would pre-release that product.