You will never read a Hands On review that does not include the price. Of course you won't, but usually price is the least significant part: whether something is expensive or not, good software and hardware is worth anything because it is so very, very useful and you use it so very, very much.
TextExpander 6 is very, very good. Yet this might as well be a Hands On review of the price, and the software's shift to subscription.
If you haven't used it or
read our previous enthusing about the software, what TextExpander does sounds simple but proves to be measurably useful. Using it, you type a few letters and TextExpander replaces those with something else. It can be a name that you find difficult to spell, it can be a paragraph you used to keep retyping. It can become quite remarkable and complex in ways that speed up repetitive typing actually wonderfully and pleasurably. It becomes so much a part of your Mac that you are surprised it isn't on everyone's computers.
Nonetheless, for once this has got to be about price first. That is partly because with this release, TextExpander has become software you have to subscribe to and so the price has radically changed. However, it's more because if you are an individual user of TextExpander then you will think that the price is the only thing that has altered.
It's not true: there's plenty that is different, most of it is good now and we expect it to become increasingly useful later, but TextExpander 6 does not appear much different to TextExpander 5. Again, hold on a moment there, but this is true enough that if you're an existing user you cannot fail to question why you should now pay a monthly fee for something you've already bought and got. More: the new version requires you to sync your settings across its own service, you can no longer use Dropbox or iCloud so actually this is an update that removes a feature you want.
We don't know the answer. You can most certainly argue that TextExpander is excellent –– you can't tell but we've used its features three times so far in this article –– and the makers Smile Software are pretty good themselves. We rate the company and even personally just like the people there so our heads and hearts want to support them. It's just that supporting a software company shouldn't feel like altruism. Not completely.
Then you can say –– and we'd bet Smile is hoping –– that in a few months or a year the subscription will seem normal and the fuss about the change will die down. That's certainly what's happened with Adobe and its subscription Creative Cloud. It's probably true and as time goes on, the people coming to TextExpander will be new users for whom the question is different. Rather than why should you pay for something you've already got, it will be whether TextExpander is useful enough to warrant subscribing.
Don't go comparing TextExpander's price with other software subscriptions. It costs $5 a month (existing users get a token one-year discount) and if you start thinking that's a three quarters of Microsoft Office 365's $7/month you might as well start thinking that it's not far off the $9 Netflix subscription too. Forget everything but this: is TextExpander worth $5 a month to you?
Smile has the enormous problem that new users are unlikely to truly get how good this software is: you read the description and you understand easily enough, but it's only when you have that TextExpander popping sound and it's sped up writing an invoice that you appreciate its worth. Then Smile has the other enormous problem that existing users really do come to regard TextExpander as an essential part of their Mac and that inevitably means we forget that it isn't. It's hard for a prospective user to see the value and it's easy for an existing one to forget that this is not something included in the computer.
Then when either look at the new price, they have to consider what alternatives there are and there are alternatives. If you barely use TextExpander then there actually is enough text expansion built into OS X for you. If you are a power user deeply versed in its intricacies then you could use
Keyboard Maestro which is built for many other things but can do this. Then in the middle there are TextExpander's rivals such as
TypeIt4Me and
Typinator which at present are all one-time purchases.
TextExpander 6 needed some big tentpole feature for individual users and it does not have one. Instead, it has features that make the software compelling for teams and companies plus it brings just one new feature that would normally be headline news. With the new version 6, TextExpander comes to Windows for the first time. It's only in a beta form at the moment but this is huge. That's partly because there is precious little like TextExpander on Windows and PC users shouldn't have to suffer, but also because so many of us work switching back and forth between the two. Now you have it on both and, increasingly, you have your same settings across both.
That is very big and the new fact that you share settings across teams and whole companies is compelling. It just doesn't matter a damn to the user who works as an individual and works only on Macs or perhaps also iOS. For them, there are no new tentpole features, there are only improvements and the removal of the Dropbox or iCloud support we rely on. Some of the improvements are significant and you can see how big a deal they were to implement, but for us as users, they are pretty small.
The most visible is on the Mac where the TextExpander editor has had a makeover: it looks better, controls are in what we now see are more sensible and handy places. Then the old and rather clunky iOS version is better at keeping your TextExpander settings the same across iPhone, iPad and Mac than it was. It does that by moving these settings and preferences online to TextExpander.com. Rather than syncing back and forth between devices using Dropbox, all your devices now look up the website and so always have your latest triggers and snippets as they're called. You can look up the website directly too: log in to your account on TextExpander.com and you can see all your settings, change them, add to them, and elect to share them with other people.
This is well done and we found ourselves spotting changes we wanted to make, we found ourselves twiddling far more than usual because the online version made that clear and easy. The online sharing is also where the teams aspect comes in now and actually where we think this will become more useful for individuals later.
If you're in a team, set up your TextExpander snippets and then your colleagues can use them all. So for instance you could tell a new recruit that this is the snippet we use when replying to complaint emails. This is the one for when people ask where to find our office. Everyone gets all of these plus each person has their own personal ones and TextExpander 6 makes it so clear which is private and which is shared that you don't even think about it.
In the future and probably the very short-term near future at that, we are certain that there will be people effectively publishing their collections of TextExpander snippets for anyone to use. We're sure of that because it's already happened: there are people who have created complex and handy snippet collections that with some effort you could download and merge into yours. Now that's going to be radically easier so it will continue, it will grow, it will be useful.
Yet today, if you're an individual user of TextExpander then upgrading to version 6 is like investing in the future. It is not something that gets you a benefit now. Well, other than the continued existence of the company and that's hardly a small thing.
Yet we're having to think about this all so very much and TextExpander is supposed to save us time, not occupy us. It also requires a little bit of action. For you can get a trial version of TextExpander 6 yet you must take some steps if you're not to be stuck with it at the end of the trial period.
On your Mac, rename the TextExpander application to something like 'Old TextExpander' before you download the trial. If you don't do that, the installation will ask if you want to replace the old one and no, you do not. Not yet. For once you've replaced version 5, it's gone. At the moment
you can re-download it from the official website if you decide you don't want to keep version 6, but there's no guarantee that this will continue to be true.
On iOS, you have no choice: you cannot install the new TextExpander app without deleting the old one. Again, right now you can redownload the old one from App Store but again, there's no guarantee that will continue. We won't miss the old iOS app but you have to have it around if other apps are to get updated with your latest snippets.
So you're having to take precautions, you're having to ponder the value of the software to you, you're really having to think about whether to use this new version and you're doing that without any clear benefit to you as an individual. We want to say yes, upgrade, and we do know that if we step back to version 5 we will miss the updated TextExpander editor, but by far the easiest thing to do now is to stay with the existing one.
Smile cautions that, of course, there's got to be a limit to how long you can continue using version 5: while the firm will support it for a time, there will come a point when some change in OS X breaks it. That's fair enough and it's an inevitable part of using any software, but as reasons to upgrade go it's poor: buy it now to get features you don't need and lose one you do or buy it later before it breaks.
TextExpander has fans and so it should: we count ourselves among them. It's still always been a difficult sell because of this way that you only appreciate the enormous usefulness of it after you've bought. So what version 6 does is keep that difficulty about convincing new users and added a complexity about convincing existing ones to continue.
Despite all the clear effort and we'd say talent that has gone into the TextExpander.com business of sharing, despite how this is in many ways a big step forward for the application, and despite how in the future we'll get used to the subscription, this upgrade has not gone well. It needed something much more visibly advantageous to individual users because right now most or perhaps even every user of TextExpander is an individual.
It's easy to say there needs to be some big new feature when we've no idea what it might be or actually whether there could even be one: TextExpander 5 does a huge amount and we are addicted to it, maybe there simply isn't anything that 6 could add. In which case these moves are the only ones available to the company.
Again, in the future when new users come to try TextExpander they won't be comparing it to the old version, they will be analysing its value to them. As we have become so profoundly keen on TextExpander we'd say it was an essential app and it continues to be worth a very great deal. We'd probably say yes, pay the subscription. Probably. We can't help but eye up the competition where we practically ignored them before because TextExpander is so good.
We just can't say that existing users should upgrade. We can't. We want to, we do, but right now existing users already have all of the features of TextExpander 6 that are important and vital. That's got to be why the firm no longer sells TextExpander 5 or its iOS counterpart: it would be good to give people the choice but when they have that option, currently the sensible thing is to buy the old one.
Take the precautions, try the trial. We want to support Smile Software: it is important to support good companies doing excellent apps but we subscribe to so much now, we have subscription fatigue as well as limits on our bank accounts, that we need better reasons than we've got so far.
TextExpander 6 requires OS X 10.10 or higher and TextExpander for iPhone and iPad requires iOS 9 or higher. The beta TextExpander for Windows needs Windows 7 or better. The cost of a TextExpander subscription is $5/month (reduced to $4 if paid annually and for one year only to $2/month for existing users). For teams and companies the cost is $10/month per user (reducing to $8 if billed annually). There is a one-year discount for existing users which brings that to $4/month but only for the number of users your company already had license for.
Who is TextExpander for:
What are you asking here, really? If you mean who is the software for then that's not changed: everyone would benefit from having this. If you mean the new software as a service, the subscription model, then we'd still say everyone would benefit but the value to you is far harder to assess. Far harder. You're pressing us now, we can tell, but the best we can call it is this: if you have TextExpander 5, stick with it, and if you haven't, check out the trial. That's a cop-out, sorry, but it's actually what we're doing now: at this moment we're leaning to subscribing but we are hesitating. Our mood changes to subscribing when we realise that on a typical day we might use TextExpander 80 times and our mood changes back again when Netflix and Apple Music take their subscriptions from our accounts.
Who is TextExpander not for:
If you don't write much, it was never a great benefit to you, really, and now it is not worth the subscription.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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