9th
Get some productivity from Lorem Ipsum
If you are a digital designer or an interaction designer you certainly know the Lorem Ipsum generator at Lipsum.com. It is of great use to fill some content area in your design or wireframes when you don’t have access to the final content or simply when the inspiration is at its low.
But if you are using this site more than once a day, then you are loosing a tremendous time of productivity: switching from your prefered graphic or vector drawing software (read photoshop and Visio) to your browser, typing the URL or locating the bookmark and clicking on it, selecting the amount of words needeed in the Lisum.com form, clicking enter, copy the desired portion of text, switching back to your last application, and pasting the Lorem text. Ouf!
I have a better solution for you (mac or Windows - or both like in my case as I use OS X for my daily activities and Visio trough Paraleles, a Windows virtual machine).
The solution…
Text substitution application:
- TextExpander (OS X), and
- Texter (Windows)
TextExpander and Texter will save you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define. Once configured properly, you’ll only have to type “.lrm5” to automaticly get printed five words of Lorem Ipsum. It goes the same with any other text substitution shortcuts: .lrm10 for ten words, .lrm15 for fifteen .lrm1p for one paragraphe, .lrm2p for two, etc…
You simply need to define an abbreviation shortcut (ex: .lrm5) and associate the text you will like to be substituted for (ex: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet) when you type it in any software you are. Naturally it can be used for any other text substitutions you will like to use it (i.e.: salutation, email signature, time-stamp, date-stamp, etc.). Both little apps are easy to configure, get out of your way and they are not greedy on system memory.
