Today, Giveaway of the Day (GAOTD) is giving away the standard edition of a program called PhraseExpander. What this program does is basically watch everything you type and when you type certain key words, the program will recognize that and replace it with predefined text. For example, if you are chatting with someone online and type "ttyl," you can have that automatically turn into "talk to you later." The program comes with its own key words and abbreviations, but you can add custom ones too. I read some of the comments on the download page and noticed that many people think that this program is simply for replacing text and having an autocorrect feature. I even saw a couple comments saying that Microsoft Word or OpenOffice does the same thing, but those programs can only replace text within themselves, so if you were typing a comment on the GAOTD site, you wouldn't be able to us MS Word's autocorrect. PhraseExpander lets its users replace text universally on your computer, no matter where you are typing. This program does much more than just replace text though. Other things it can do include opening documents and files, running programs, searching the internet, navigating to websites, and opening and sending new emails using Outlook using key words. It is really a productivity saver.
When using this program to execute commands, the user doesn't even have to type into a text area. For example, you could be on your desktop, then decide you want to check your email, you can just type the word "email" on the desktop and this program will open up your web browser and navigate to gmail.com (or Hotmail or Yahoo or Outlook, whatever you use for your email). There are other practical uses for this program as well, such as storing passwords. I found out about a program called ActiveWords last summer and I have been using it ever since. ActiveWords is the same type of program as PhraseExpander. My main uses of ActiveWords (which could be your main uses for PhraseExpander) are to open up certain files that I use a lot, navigate to websites, launch programs, and replace text with my passwords. An example of a password replacement: if my password for Gmail is "B4ukfj*(3kHK39+ksai," then that could be hard to remember, but at the same time it is very secure. When I go to gmail.com, I could just type "gmailpw" into the password field and it would replace that text with my password (you may want to be cautious of replacing passwords on a shared computer) and then I don't have to memorize or copy and paste my password. This can even be more secure than typing your actual password, especially if you have a laptop and you type in your passwords in various locations. An example of this would be if you're sitting in a coffee shop and, as luck would have it, there is a hacker sitting at the table right next to you. If you type your password, he may be able to see what keys you are pressing and later be able to get into your account, but if all he sees you type is "gmailpw," if he tries to login with that as the password, it won't work.
Now I want to talk about a few of the comments from the download page of GAOTD. Some of the people who commented said that this is not a good program because it is like texting and it will ruin a person's sense of grammar and spelling. However, if a person uses this program like I do, text is rarely even replaced, except for passwords. A person could use this program mainly for launching other programs and doing other tasks that may be annoying to do with the mouse every time. It can be seen kind of as an advanced hotkey program. It would be tedious to have to use the mouse every time you wanted to copy and paste something because then you would have to right click then copy, go to the place you want to paste, then right click and then click paste. Knowing that Ctrl+C means copy and Ctrl+V means paste is much more handy.
Another thing I saw in the comments was something about the .NET framework having to be installed. The commenter was angry (as far as I could tell anyway) when he found out that the .NET framework had been installed and then commented to complain. Well, the framework does need to be installed, if it isn't already, for this program to work properly and that will likely mean changes to the registry. However, I don't think it is right that he complained about this because during installation, a notice pops up letting the user know that it needs to be installed.
If you want to try out PhraseExpander, I encourage you to do so. However, if you don't know if you want to keep it and are afraid of the registry changes and the .NET framework being installed, I suggest you download and install Deep Freeze by Faronics. This program will "freeze" your hard drive in the its current state, then restart your computer in frozen mode. Anything you change on your computer when it's in frozen mode will disappear once you restart your computer again. You can change the Deep Freeze settings by holding shift and double clicking its icon in the system tray (the icons next to the clock). You can download a 30-day evaluation here.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned (or something I left out), feel free to ask them in the comments below.
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