Many thanks to Smile, one of the very best Mac and iOS developers, for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

The new TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the video demo and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.

Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)

Still haven’t tried TextExpander? Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

That Brett Kelly is one crafty nerd. I’m going to start collecting digital signatures from my favorite bloggers and authors.

Les Posen took apart the recent Apple keynote and explains how they created some of their animations. I entirely endorse Les’s call for a highlighting tool in Keynote. Hopefully we’ll get a new iWork soon with iCloud and retina Mac support. Three years without a major update is a long time.

Mac Power Users Episode 93, Workflows with Fraser Speirs, is up. This is a fantastic episode and whether or not you are interested in technology and education, I recommend listening. Get the episode over at 5by5. Also, don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes.

Here is a clever Kickstarter project to use a MicroSD card in your MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

There’s a lot of talk lately about an upcoming 7 inch iPad from Apple. I think the pundits are having a hard time wrapping their minds around this because it doesn’t seem to have a place in the Apple product family. After all, Apple makes small phones and large tablets. They don’t make large phones and small tablets. I think the point is that the pundits are not the target audience for this device. If Apple were to make the 7 inch iPad – I think they will – it would be primarily for those people not willing to plunk down $500 for an iPad. There are a lot of those people and right now their only option is a competing operating system. Don’t you think a company so willing to jump into the meat grinder of patent litigation with its competitors to keep them out of the marketplace would also release a product that could be so much more effective at capturing market and mindshare?

I think a 7 inch iPad in the $250 price range, along with the app store and all the other great things that Apple has built, would be devastating to competing tablet manufacturers. Apple employed a similar strategy in the iPod market and the rest of the MP3 player market never recovered. I don’t know whether Apple calls it the next generation iPod touch or the iPad Mini but the result would be the same either way, a lot of units sold to customers that would otherwise have gone to Amazon, Samsung, and others.

In the running battle for iOS scanning supremacy, today Readdle released Scanner Pro 4.1. The interface overhaul is now complete and I like it. The grid lines in camera mode help me square the document and it runs its very own stability check when you snap the picture. Moreover, it now syncs everything between your devices with iCloud. With this update (along with the recent iPad optimized version), Scanner Pro has officially replaced JotNot in my life.

Here is a nice collection of OmniFocus scripts, relocated courtesy of the MobileMe shutdown.

via The Candler Blog

That Michael Schechter is one clever guy. I am so down with this.