Anyone who writes for a living, or even writes as part of their job, knows that much of the text in the world is repetitive - the same names, addresses, signatures, answers to frequently asked questions, and so on. But there's no reason to waste time typing those boring bits of text - that's what we have computers for! All you need is a program like SmileOnMyMac's TextExpander to eliminate unnecessary effort from your daily life by expanding abbreviations into snippets of text and by fixing common typographical errors.

Released in March 2010, TextExpander 3.0 added the capability to fill in variable content in a snippet during expansion (a bit like mail merge for text expansion!). It also added snippet searching, support for Tab and Return in snippets, hotkeys for entering new abbreviations and editing the last-expanded snippet, snippet synchronization via Dropbox, and automatic sentence capitalization correction. Then, with the June 2010 update to TextExpander 3.1, SmileOnMyMac focused on smoothing the user experience by adding hotkeys to activate TextExpander and to search snippets, enabling the user to hide the TextExpander Dock icon, and enhancing the search results display. (As always, our TidBITS AutoCorrect Dictionary is available for TextExpander users who wish to add a few thousand common typographical errors to their abbreviation lists.)

In this week's DealBITS drawing, you can enter to win one of three copies of TextExpander 3, each worth $34.95. Entrants who aren't among our lucky winners will receive a discount on TextExpander, so be sure to enter at the DealBITS page. All information gathered is covered by our comprehensive privacy policy. Remember that if someone you refer to this drawing wins, you'll receive the same prize as a reward for spreading the word.