I'm responding to comments made in several different posts on this thread: 1. ShortCut5 being slow versus Textras: I installed SC5 last night and added maybe 60 shortcuts. Bill was correct. I didn't have any problem with speed. My earlier question came from the owner's comments elsewhere relating to why SC5 was slower than Textras:
"The performance impact of ShortCut5 would be the greatest with apps that generate a lot of events. These would typically be games, graphical apps, and benchmarks. And of course these are the same types of apps where you probably won't use ShortCut5. The apps where you would typically use ShortCut5, like Memo, Address, Datebook, Tasks, generate very few events. My suggestion would be to only enable ShortCut5 for the apps in which you really want to use it." 2. ShortCut5 working on more apps than Textras: J Messeder was correct. Here's what the owner states in the User Guide in the FAQS section: "When a system shortcut (not ShortCut5) is expanded, it places all the new characters in the queue as keydown events. But the queue is limited in size. This is why system shortcuts are very small (typically about 45 character at most). I believe that Textras does something totally different (I'm just guessing here since I don't have access to their source code). Textras modifies the internal data structures to insert the characters into a PalmOS text field. This is why the update is quick. The downside is that not all apps uses PalmOS text fields. Some apps like Docs to Go or WordSmith implement their own custom version of text fields (instead of using the ones provided by the operation system). In this case Textras won't work (since it does not know the internal data structures these apps are using). ShortCut5 takes the approach like how the system shortcuts work. But instead of placing all the new characters in the queue, it only puts a character in after one has been taken out. This is to not overflow the queue. This is why the update is slow. The upside is that this method should work in virtually all apps." This is interesting but a non-issue to me since the speed is fine and SC5 works everywhere that I want it to work. 3. Active Words: This is very powerful PC tool that allows the user to execute commands across all PC apps. It does much more than text expansion. Simple shortcut commands will find any doc, file, folder, app, menu, webpage, etc. and open it and execute menu commands. Anything that can be accomplished with a keyboard can be done with a one-word command. For example, it can turn off a PC; find Palm Desktop, open it, open tasks, open a new task, type something, close everyhting, etc. It performs in-place time, date, and math conversions. It is one of the most powerful PC tools one can own and an entire industry of forums, teachers, systems and databases has sprung up around it. I believe that its capabilities exceed Google's Desktop search engine, Mac's Spotlight, RoboForm for PC, TextExpander for Mac, etc. It has large data bases that correct misspellings, execute web commands, execute contractions and hyphenations from shortcuts. It has specific command databases for Google, Palm Desktop, Outlook, etc. To get a good look at it, go to www.activewords.com. I was very sorry to leave it behind when I bought a Mac a month ago. Mac has nothing this comprehensive althouigh there are Mac tools that do some of the things that it will do. I hope that helps.
