snippets
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France fines Google $590 million in latest antitrust action
Regulators say the company offered publishers 'negligible' payments for using their news content.
Google agrees to pay French publishers for news previews
Google has signed a deal with publishers in France to pay for content used for preview snippets in its news section.
France orders Google to pay news companies for showing article extracts
France’s competition authority has ordered Google to negotiate payments with publishers and news agencies to display extracts on its news, search and discovery pages. The interim ruling comes after France implemented the EU’s “Copyright Directive” law that forced Google to pay publishers to use snippets of articles in searches.
Google removes news previews in France to avoid paying publishers
Google has announced that it will not pay publishers in France for search results, and will instead show stripped back results for News. That will happen next month when France enforces new rules base on Europe's controversial copyright law. "We will no longer display an overview of the content in France for European press publishers, unless the publisher tells us that it's okay," said Google in a blog. It added that publishers will get new webmaster settings that will allow them to specify how much information they want to preview in News results.
YouTube warns its copyright changes could result in more takedowns
YouTube will no longer allow copyright holders to seize a creator's revenue over very brief or unintentional music clips that appears in videos, it said in a blog post. That means that if a five-second clip or the radio from a passing car appears in a video, labels won't be able to make a "manual claim" and seize all the revenue. However, they'll still be allowed to completely strike or demonetize videos with short clips, which "may result in more blocked content in the near-term," YouTube admitted.
Google takes steps to combat fake news 'snippets'
Google announced this week that it is revamping its "snippets" feature, which is the featured description you usually see at the top of search results when you input a question. Recently, the search engine has come under fire for displaying "fake news" as snippets. Now, the company is updating its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to help human raters more accurately flag hoaxes, conspiracy theories and false and/or offensive information. Additionally, it is adjusting its rankings to promote high-quality content and demote low-quality content.
Mac Productivity > 10 TextExpander Date Snippets
TextExpander (Smile Software) is a utility I use each and every day on my Mac to save time and increase productivity. One of the things I use it for is formatting and inserting dates and times -- adding the date or time to a file or folder name, into an email, a document and so on. In this post, I've shared some of my most used date and time snippets. I hope you find them as useful as I do. If you're not a TextExpander user, I encourage you to give it a try. You can download a trial version on the Smile Software website. Let me give you a little background on how it works. The concept of TextExpander is simple. You start by creating snippets of text. You then assign abbreviations to those snippets. Whenever you type an abbreviation into any app on your Mac, presto! The corresponding snippet is inserted, replacing the abbreviation you typed. TextExpander also includes some power-user features, such as macros, which let you to insert variable information into your snippets, like dates and times. This is what I'm sharing here -- some of the macros I use for inserting dates. I've provided a brief description of each snippet, as well as the snippet code (the macro), and the abbreviation I use. Feel free to adjust accordingly to meet your own needs. 1. Current Date -- Long: This snippet actually comes with TextExpander as an example. It's used to insert the current date in Month, D, YYYY format, i.e. January 9, 2013. I consider this a long date, and changed the abbreviation, so as not to conflict with my other snippets. Snippet: %B %e, %Y Abbreviation: CDATEL 2. Current Date -- Short: This snippet inserts the current date in YYYY-DD-MM format, i.e. 2013-01-09. This is a good format to use when applying dates to file and folder names, as it allows them to be sorted by year, month and day. Snippet: %Y-%m-%d Abbreviation: CDATES 3. Current Time - Long - This snippet inserts the current time in H:M:SS AM/PM format, i.e. 10:00:00 AM. While this format is good for inserting into emails or documents, it's not so good to use on file or folder names, due to its use of colons. Snippet: %1I:%M:%S %p Abbreviation: CTIMEL 4. Current Time -- Short: This snippet inserts the current time in HH-MM-SS format, i.e. 10-00-00. This is a good format to use when applying times to file and folder names, as it doesn't contain any colons. It also uses 24-hour time, in order to avoid potential file name conflicts. Snippet: %H-%M-%S Abbreviation: CTIMES 5. Month and Year: This snippet inserts the current month and year, in Month YYYY format, i.e. January 2013. I often need to reference the current month in this manner when writing emails. Snippet: %B %Y Abbreviation: MDATE 6. Yesterday: The following snippet subtracts one day from the current date and inserts it in YYYY-MM-DD format, i.e. 2013-01-08. Snippet: %@-1D%Y-%m-%d Abbreviation: YDATE 7. Tomorrow: The following snippet adds one day to the current date, and inserts it in YYYY-MM-DD format, i.e. 2013-01-10. Snippet: %@+1D%Y-%m-%d Abbreviation: TDATE 8. Future Date: The following snippet can be customized to add a specified number of days to the current date, in YYYY-DD-MM format. I have several versions of this snippet for two, three and four days in the future. Snippet: %@+(INSERT NUMBER OF DAYS HERE)D%Y-%m-%dd Abbreviation: FDATE(NUMBER OF DAYS) I.e. For two days in the future: Snippet: %@+2D%Y-%m-%dd Abbreviation: FDATE2 9. Next Sunday: I often need to refer to next Sunday in emails, invoices and so on in YYYY-MM-DD format. This goes beyond what TextExpander's built-in macros can do, so I resort to AppleScript. Just set the content type of your snippet to AppleScript, and paste in the following code: Snippet: Abbreviation: NEXTSUN 10. Current Week Range: I also sometimes need to insert a range of dates representing the current week. Again, this goes beyond the capabilities of TextExpander's build-in macros, so I use AppleScript. Again, set the content type to AppleScript, and paste in the following: Snippet: Abbreviation: CWEEK
iOS code hints iChat functionality coming to mobile
Developer John Heaton found some code in the latest version of iOS that hints iChat functionality could finally be coming to the mobile operating system. The code mentions various chat services like Jabber and AIM, and while it doesn't specifically mention iChat, there's certainly some strings in there that aren't yet included in any of Apple's standard apps. We've heard rumors of something like this before -- the revamped iMessage in iOS 5 is essentially iChat for iOS, though it still doesn't directly connect to the IM services mentioned in this code. Apple may not bother calling it iChat, but it's clear that at some point, the company was at least testing more functionality on mobile. We'll have to see -- it would be nice to have the messaging app on the iPhone send messages out to a number of different services, but obviously Apple hasn't announced any of this just yet.
Snippets: A cheaper text macro option for the Mac
Snippets by Conceited Software is a US$5 text macro application for the Mac. Define a shortcut such as "mas" to have it automatically expand to "Mac App Store" or other words, phrases and even entire paragraphs of text. You can even include rich text, such as bold, italics and images. I've been using Snippets for the past few days instead of my usual macros program, TextExpander, and I have to say I'm impressed. The interface is clean, replacements are fast, and a recent update added "placeholder" text so that you can have Snippets pause during expansion for you to enter in some text, such as someone's name. It's a great utility that does what it says it will. Coming from TextExpander, there are some features that I definitely miss, such as Dropbox syncing, the ability to automatically add the current date or time and, yes, even the little sound that TextExpander plays when it expands a shortcut (full disclosure: my wife hates the sound and hopes to never hear it again). Then again, TextExpander (previously Textpander) has been around since 2005, whereas Snippets is only a few months old. I fully expect it will get better and add these features, but remember my rule for buying software: buy it only for what it does today, not for what you hope (or developers say) it will do tomorrow. If you already own TextExpander, TypeItForMe or Typinator, you don't need Snippets. However, if you have been in the market for a text macros app but have been put off by the cost -- $35 for TextExpander, €19.99 (about $27 as of this writing) for Typinator or $20 for TypeItForMe -- Snippets might be just what you are looking for. Its biggest shortcoming right now is that there is no way to export your shortcuts, so if you use more than one Mac, you'll have to enter them separately on each Mac. Snippets is available exclusively through the Mac App Store. UPDATE: The 1.2 release of Snippets (4 Feb 2011) added the ability to insert current date and time into shortcuts, as well as fixing the "tab order" bug when moving through input fields with the keyboard when creating a new snippet.
Friday Favorite: Snippets
Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Brett tells us about his favorite new snippet manager. If you write code, you probably reuse blocks of it. Whether you're working in HTML, CSS, AppleScript, Objective-C ... it's all code, and a really well-written chunk of it deserves to be used again. You can put a few of your most commonly used snippets into TextExpander, sure, but the biggest problem is finding that function you know you wrote last year but haven't used since. This common little conundrum has given rise to some very elegant applications that aim to solve this and other related problems. There have been a few great options lately for snippet organization. CodeCollector Pro has been my long-running favorite, with Snippet a close second. I like Snippet's sexiness, but miss having a nice, big, multi-pane window to organize with. CodeCollector Pro is a solid workhorse, but actions such as adding new snippets are a little more cumbersome than I'd like. I often just clip things into Evernote when I'm in a hurry ... Then, along came Snippets (note the 's' that differentiates it from Snippet) to steal my heart. It's got Code Collector's utility, Evernote's searchability, and it's got an extra dash of sexy, ala Snippet. It has the standard sytax-highlighted code viewer, and a sidebar with groups and folders. Snippets are classified by language, which can be set in a dropdown or by just dragging a snippet to a language folder. It functions on a hybrid folder/tag concept, which happens to be the way I do just about everything. Each snippet can have a description, as well as labels (tags) and all full-text indexed for searching. You've also got groups, which are like folders, but a snippet can belong to multiple groups. It has smart folders which, as you know, function like automatic groups with boolean criteria. On top of all that, folders, smart folders and groups can all be gathered hierarchically in nested folders, with parent folders showing all of the contents of their child folders. Whew!
ShoveBox for Mac and iPhone
One thing we don't lack for on the fairer platform is snippet / notes managers. Nonetheless, I always find myself curious about the new applications, perhaps because nothing ever quite gets everything just right. ShoveBox is one of the newer entries in the snippet sweepstakes, and while it has been out on the Mac for a while they've just recently released an companion iPhone app (iTunes link).ShoveBox's main advantage is its very simple interface. The little ShoveBox icon sits in your menubar waiting for you to drop something on it: URL, text, images, etc. Without any fuss the box opens and accepts your newest shove, ready to be accessed at some later time. My impression is that ShoveBox is best not so much for things you want to keep in the long run (though it will do that), but perhaps more as a scratchpad or an updated and more advanced URLwell.The iPhone companion app does exactly what you'd expect, giving you access to your notes, etc. on the go. One particularly nifty function is a bookmarklet that allows you to import a website on both the desktop version (from Safari) or the iPhone version (from mobile Safari). So if you're reading something on the go, but want to make sure you save it for later as well, this looks like a great feature.ShoveBox for Mac is $24.95 and a demo is available; the iPhone version is $3.99 from the iTunes App Store.
Code Collector Pro 1.1.3
While many apps can accomplish the capturing and organizing of text, Code Collector Pro offers a singular focus on code snippets that makes it an excellent tool for programmers. It features a simple interface with tagging support, grouping and code highlighting which is accomplished by way of language definitions from TextMate bundles. If you already code in TextMate, you'll be able to add support for your favorite languages to Code Collector Pro with ease. The bundles are available for non-TextMate users as well. Code Collector Pro's system service quickly adds snippets to your collection from any application; that's definitely useful. A menubar item is also included which allows for quick searching and copy-to-clipboard of your snippets. That part needs a little refining to reduce the mouse-keyboard-mouse switching necessary to complete the search. Version 1.1.3 was released today with some minor bug fixes. Registering Code Collector Pro will run you about $29 (€20) and a demo is available. There is a far less feature-packed but entirely free standard version as well. A feature comparison is available on the Pro page.
Typinator 2.0 35% off at MacZOT today only
It hasn't even been two weeks since Typinator went 2.0, and now it's on a 35%-off sale at MacZOT for $12.99 (regular price: $19.99). This handy typing and snippet manager is a great tool for helping you work faster with text, and a deal this good is both rare and virtually impossible to beat. If you're looking to try before you buy, head over to ergonis software's Typinator product page to snag a demo, but do it quick: MacZOT's sales are one-day-only affairs. When it's gone, it's gone.
Typinator 2.0 released with a flood of new features
Typing tools that increase your efficiency are all the rage for anyone who has to type more than their name and credit card number on a daily basis, and ergonis just upped the ante with the release of Typinator 2.0. Competing directly with similar tools like TextExpander and TypeIt4Me, this new version of Typinator brings a virtual boatload of new features to the table, including: Sets allow convenient organization of abbreviations Import and export of abbreviation sets Comes with auto-correction sets for English, German and French Import from Textpander, TextExpander and TypeIt4Me Application-specific set assignment Typinator can be disabled in individual applications Clipboard insertion within expansions Streamlined user interface for improved conformance to Apple's guidelines The abbreviation table can be sorted by abbreviation, expansion, options, and conflict status Expansion of abbreviations is much faster now, even while typing extremely fast and with thousands of defined abbreviations and auto-corrections Significantly reduced memory requirements, especially with large expansions and much, much more As a paid user of TextExpander, this new release of Typinator looks quite tasty indeed. I'm actually just glad the typing tool space is getting more competitive, as I can't write or work on the web without one anymore. A demo is of course available, while a single licenses sells for about $26 (EUR 19.99).
Free HTML snippet file for TextExpander
TextExpander is another favorite utility in the TUAW tool belt, as it can save a boatload of time with repeatedly typing anything from email signatures to canned customer service replies and even code. In fact, SmileOnMyMac just made HTML coding a bit easier on web designers and hackers everywhere by posting an HTML snippet file that contains abbreviations for over 60 common pieces of HTML, ripe for cutting down on the time it takes to hand code your sites. This file should serve as a great example of the power of TextExpander, since SmileOnMyMac made sure to use some of the app's tricks that insert the cursor in a useful place after expanding a snippet, such as in between the quotes of: <a href=""></a>, allowing you to easily fill in the blanks. But don't stop there - a little exploring of how these snippets are put together should enable you to build your own for the specific kinds of work and code you use.This snippet file is free from SmileOnMyMac's site, and the highly recommended TextExpander sells for $29.95 with a whopping 90 day money-back guarantee.
TUAW Tip: TextExpander can subscribe to text snippets
This isn't quite so much a killer trick or hack you can perform on TextExpander - an indispensable time-saving text abbreviation and expansion utility - as much as it's a neat feature that I just recently discovered. TextExpander can export a list of all your text snippets and corresponding abbreviations, and it can subscribe to such a list if you keep it somewhere, say, like your iDisk or an FTP/WebDAV space. If you have a desktop and lappy for working on the go like me, this can more or less enable rudimentary syncing for your snippets between Macs. Of course, it would rock if SmileOnMyMac would make this an official feature, with bonus points awarded for baking in both .Mac and FTP/WebDAV syncing (like Mr. Simmons did with NetNewsWire). For now though, this might be a decent solution for keeping your snippets n'sync.
iClip Lite 2 Dashboard widget released
iClip Lite, as we've mentioned in the past, is a free, widgetized version of the shareware iClip. The Lite widget version is "a multiple clipboard & scrapbook widget designed to improve your efficiency and productivity for most tasks you do on your computer". New in version 2 is: • universal binary • automatic Clipboard recording • smooth widget resizing • increased number of bins from 20 to 25 • all new, stylish designiClip Lite is free and available from Inventive.
SmileOnMyMac Releases TextExpander 1.3, the Customizable Typing Timesaver Tool
Earlier in May, SmileOnMyMac acquired Textpander, a really handy (and free) text insertion utility. Today, they released their first official version update in which they changed the name to TextExpander, added a few snippet-creation features and are now charging a lump-in-throat inducing price of $29.95. The new features include the ability to create snippets from selected text, snippet nesting and the ability to limit usage to an application list.A 30-day demo is available, but I have to say: I'm really happy I backed up the disk image of the latest version of Textpander. I haven't installed this new retail version of TextExpander yet, but slapping $29.95 (without any warning) on a utility that was previously free donationware stings quite a bit (Fraser Speirs, I would argue, handled this transition a lot better with the FlickrExport 2.0 beta introduction). If any enthusiastic users of Textpander make the leap, feel free to share your impressions with the new features and whether you think it's worth $30.[UPDATE: Peter Maurer makes a really good point: Textpander wasn't free, it was donationware. Unfortunately, the donation system clearly wasn't working, as Hawk Wings points out that many donationware-centric developers lament that only 1-2% of downloaders actually donate anything for the app. Let TextExpander serve as a good lesson for what happens when you don't show some donation love to hard working developers.]
