Messages

51

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 11:53 AM »

What I wonder that some visitors here debate my tone in great extend while having any slightest problem with the tone/accusations of the original poster at all. Stunning!

And yes, I am not a native speaker and I start to believe that my words seem to have a different meaning than intended. For example, I wonder, why some value my first response as "aggressive"?! Of course, I clearly refused the original poster's claims and it seems to be too obvious that he is a troll but is it really considered aggressive in "your" culture to say it?

52

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 10:53 AM »

Finally, I have at least one fan!

53

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 10:42 AM »

Ah, WRAITH! I seriously wondered that you haven't shown up yet to "waste your resources on this discussion".

It was only a question of time but you never fail to deliver, do you? 

54

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 10:33 AM »

There are countless threads on the internet making fun of lady gaga

There is a difference between ridiculing vs. making bold and false claims with the intention to harm one's business. Be lucky that you don't have to deal with it.

concentrate on software development

It is awesome to see that many of you are caring about the PhraseExpress development. I gladly confirm, that PhraseExpress is continuously improved right now. We also have very exciting new features to come.

If you have any feature suggestions, please do not hesitate to tell.

By the way, just to make clear if you are afraid: I personally am not member of the development team. I am not that smart but happy to tell you, that my sole task is to serve you if you have any question about PhraseExpress.

You can rest assured, that PhraseExpress development is well alive and not interrupted the slightes bit because of this thread here.

55

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 09:55 AM »

But,
if you respond like this (conspiracy theories, personal atrtacks), you are only fulfilling all the negative descriptions of the OP . . .

Conspiracy theory? Personal attacks? Who could I attack if the original is nothing but an anonymous troll who is gone already? You must be kidding.

It is awesome to see the outcome here. Trolls always win. Especially at DC. :-)

56

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 09:41 AM »

This must be the first developer in my observation who is defending or responding so aggressively to get the word out for his software.    

-mahesh2k (April 20, 2011, 09:36 AM)

Have you actually read the original posting at all? It's sole intention was to badmouth our company.

You can be lucky that it never happened to you but wouldn't you defend yourself as well if you would find such false public accusations about you?

57

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 09:21 AM »

At least you have a sense of humor

Of course, I thought it would be the other way. Some folks look so grumpy here at DC.

Boys, we have been severely accused and offended by this troll and you expect us to ignore that? Sorry, but this is quite difficult, especially as it was so easy to pull the plug out of his pointless arguments.

58

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 08:50 AM »

Enough reason that I wouldn't even consider using their software, tbh

This is a real pity, as your contribution is actually the best example why you in particular could benefit the most in PhraseExpress: http://screencast.com/t/ABMKiWRbOyVe

You could efficiently simplify posting your repetitive opinion over and over again. A great time saver.

59

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 06:38 AM »

But if you re-read their post you will see that this is an assumption as well.

No, I see questions.

--

The next logical step will be a post by the troll's original DC account to support the troll and we are in the game.

Ironically, exactly that sort of game, the troll is accusing us to play.

Good bye for this thread. We are there to help with any PhraseExpress related questions but it is pointless to "discuss" with an anonymous troll.

Here is the fish for "ggamer": ><((((º>

60

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint about Bartels Media \ the PhraseExpress people

« on: April 20, 2011, 03:58 AM »

I know, that I violate a golden internet forum rule now and I am sorry to ruin your "investigations" so quickly:

Mattphoes, Merida, and BartelsMedia PhraseExpress Michael are all the same person.

Do you really believe, that I am that schizophrenic to even mail between "my own" accounts?

Make ample use of bold and italicized text.

This must not be. Boy, we patented it!

English seems to be a secondary language for all three users.

I apologize in the name of hundreds of Indian, Italian and French forum participators for the lack of our English skills as it is not our native language. Perhaps you can help us to improve our English if you wish to contribute something actually useful.
 

Look, all we do for the last 13 years is to develop software. And yes, we are obsessive. We are obsessed in a hopefully positive way to provide quality software and quality technical support.

We are very thankful that our wholehearted obsession led to a quite successful product. We are genuinly thankful every single day, that PhraseExpress is used by many hundred-thousands of happy users today.

However, we had to learn, that such success also attracts individuals that are not that happy about our success for any reason, agenda or motivation.

Of course, we do make mistakes. If users post constructive feedback, we really try to improve our offerings, to help or to clarify. You can see that here, at Twitter, or anywhere else where Google Alert points me to. Including your posting.

When PhraseExpress started to enter the download charts, the increasing level of aggression by a few users really shocked us at first. Especially, as such aggressive bashing surprisingly always seem to come from users of our free version. Get that: We give away our hard-work for free and what do we get? Ranting and bad-mouthing by a few users.

We were very confused about this bizarre development at first. You contribute to the community and you get nasty slaps in the face. That really hurt.

So, even as you are a anonymous troll, you reached your goal, and successfully hurt us. We feel sad about such postings.

Now, as you seem to be an established DC member, would you please tell us the reason why you don't post with your real DC account but use a dummy account for that? Is it, because you are a jealous competitor or is it, because you know that your posting is not true and you don't want to harm your real account's reputation?

And as you seem to be very alert about our product for whatever interesting reason and as you obviously invested so much time in your very elaborated research, please tell us about your motivation (as in "Qui Bono?") why you try to hurt us in such sophisticated way?

Something really bad must happened to you and if there is anything, we could fix, we would be more than happy to do that.

61

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PhraseExpress v8, Pro Edition, on BdJ, Tuesday 12 April, 2011

« on: April 18, 2011, 04:33 PM »

Auspex is more usable in my opinion because of it's ease of use.

Mmmh: http://screencast.com/t/ZnkjdC8SUj

We would be very curious to learn how to make it any easier than that?! 

62

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PhraseExpress v8, Pro Edition, on BdJ, Tuesday 12 April, 2011

« on: April 18, 2011, 04:27 PM »

ABCZ is actually rather designed for typing pros and requires to take a certain learning curve.

Here is another video that shows you how to configure Autotexts that are offered and narrowed down as you type:
http://screencast.com/t/gt3ZS3nORb

This may be much more useful for most.

63

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PhraseExpress v8, Pro Edition, on BdJ, Tuesday 12 April, 2011

« on: April 18, 2011, 04:13 PM »

Did you know that PhraseExpress can create ABCZ files from any source of plain text word lists?

Here is a video that illustrates how this is done:
http://screencast.com/t/P005a0nAP

Enjoy!

64

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PhraseExpress v8, Pro Edition, on BdJ, Tuesday 12 April, 2011

« on: April 17, 2011, 03:58 AM »

Thank you for your kind words about PhraseExpress and your support.

--

PhraseExpress v8 now introduced a dedicated Autostart option for those individuals who can't manually add/remove a link from the Windows Startup folder:



We invented so many bleeding edge technologies for PhraseExpress, such as the full sentence text-prediction and many other features, but apparently under-estimated such Autostart option.

Well, as someone who tries to have as few programs in my startup menu as possible and hates it when a program puts itself there without at least asking me if I want it there, I'm very sympathetic when other people have this complaint.

 

It's right there: http://screencast.com/t/rvqowNxkf5i

And with PE I had the added problem of its trying--and failing--to predict what I wanted to say.  That was one reason I eventually stopped using it.

If you don't need text auto-completions in a particular program, you can easily disable PhraseExpress features for individual programs.

Seems to me the two products [PhraseExpress / Auspex] are compatible, each with a particular usage that only sometimes overlaps the other.

Just curious: What do you miss in PhraseExpress what you think can only be accomplished with Auspex, please?

65

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 19, 2011, 08:24 AM »

I do not hide my identity as coming from PhraseExpress. Of course, I answer questions about our software if they arise.

For this purpose I have configured Google Alerts that notifies me if our product name is mentioned on any social media platform. It is because, you are important to us.

I am particularly eager to clarify things if any user (regardless if authentic or fake) praises a feature of a competitor that even originally came from us.

I hope that you at least don't believe that we stage users who apparently seem to have registered here for the sole purpose to bring up a competitor name?

In this context, you have to be aware, that competitors have set Google Alerts for our product as well. ;-)

66

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 18, 2011, 12:18 PM »

did you know that you can make a folder full of abbreviations pop up as a context menu in any window for you to choose an abbreviation?

-caveatrob (March 18, 2011, 12:08 PM)

PhraseExpress does this since 2006:

It also has some unique extra features:

• PhraseExpress automatically offers a popup menu when you re-use the same Autotext for multiple phrases.
• You can also assign a hotkey instead of just an Autotext which offers additional options to quickly select the desired item from the popup menu.
• The popup does not interrupt your typing flow when it is shown. If you ignore it, it automatically disappears after a few keystrokes.
• You can make any popup menu a "floating menu" that stays on the desktop for easy access.
• Phrases can also be selected via a customizable quick-key.
• A preview of the phrase contents is shown if you hover over items in the popup.
• The popup menu look can be configured in detail.

Here is a list of features in PhraseExpress for comparison.

67

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 18, 2011, 08:40 AM »

Generally, it is a good idea to offer extra features as plug-ins or additonal product variations.

But users are already confused by our three editions (Easy, Standard, Pro) and we would like to avoid adding complexity in this area.

And Regex is totally integrated and fits so smartly into the general product architecture that it would be unnecessaryy overhead to make a plugin out of it.

We will probably add the feature via a command-line parameter.

68

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 18, 2011, 08:30 AM »

Oops, I forgot the smilie on my previous suggestion. It is not meant too serious.

However, the more I think about it, the more appealing the idea get. Normal users probably have no interest in the feature anyway. And if they can't answer the easy RegEx quizz, then the feature really is not useful for them. It would break more than it would help.

By the way, RegEx already works for every user but just the pre-defined "special functions" provided by us. Some sort of read-only phrases.

69

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 18, 2011, 04:16 AM »

RegEx is a very good example.

PhraseExpress has RegEx support for a long time. The "Inline Calc" feature of PhraseExpress is based on it, for example:



However, as a few already stated, RegEx is a wild beast. It can do amazing things but at the same time is far too complex for average non-programmer users. Mistakes can easily render your keyboard useless (while the Text Expander is running).

You can offer such features if you are offering a "Take it or leave it" freeware that has no support obligations. Timns seems to provide nice support for you folks here but we as company would drown by support load within minutes if we would release such feature in our mainstream application, used by many corporations who rely on a stable software that must be bullet-proof.

It is a coincidence that we just discussed here whether to offer the RegEx feature in PhraseExpress for those who ask for. It would look like shown here: http://screencast.com/t/W0aVDibk5C

Perhaps, we could request the user to solve a short RegEx quizz before the feature can be enabled. Somehow like skill-checking captcha.

What do you think?

70

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Text Expander software for Windows

« on: March 17, 2011, 03:54 PM »

Hi, Michael here from PhraseExpress.

I think they include an algorithm that tries to decide whether you're using it for personal or commercial purposes.  I can see why, but it must be very hard to make an accurate decision.

-rjbull (March 14, 2011, 06:45 AM)

We used to give away free licenses to users who provide evidence for any claim that our commercial use detection would be malfunctioning. So far, we never had to issue a license for that reason.

Phrase Express is below the level of Auspex in light user specific input for features, as well as user custom settings.

-cmpm (March 13, 2011, 09:52 PM)

We listen to user feedback with utmost care and would be sorry if you got a another impression.

However, PhraseExpress matured over 12 years and already include so many features driven by user demand that it becomes incrementally difficult to add new things as we want to be focussed. Nonetheless, we try our best to stay to be the innovator in our niche.

Just curious, as you compare PhraseExpress to Auspex. Is there any feature in Auspex, that you miss in PhraseExpress?

And I found Phrase Express to be more intrusive and overkill then helpful.

-cmpm (March 13, 2011, 09:52 PM)

As always, it depends on what you make out of a tool. If you turn on all the "knobs", it does a lot of things. PhraseExpress is no exception.

But, PhraseExpress has an Easy Mode and an Expert Mode. If you feel overwhelmed by the complexity, the Easy mode is your blue pill.

71

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Insert Anywhere Date and Time utility

« on: January 19, 2011, 02:34 PM »

Hi CodeTrucker,

as you asked for date insertion with permanent menu on the desktop, you may want to check out PhraseExpress.

* It can insert the time and date, current day of the year or calendar week in any customizable format.

* The timestamp can optionally be shifted by minutes, hours, days, workdays (Mo-Fr/Sa), weeks, months or years.

* The time stamp can be rounded time by 1/4, 1/2 and full hours ("11:45" looks nicer than "11.41").

Please find more information about the time stamp function in the manual.


The Pro Edition additionally offers floating menus that does what you want:

* Floating menus stay on top on your desktop and you can click phrases to insert them into the currently active application.

* Alternatively you can drag any item from the floating menu into any desired program.

Please find more information about floating menus in the manual.

Of course, you can also trigger the date/time stamp insertion by either hotkey or a text abbreviation (Autotext).

72

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« on: January 16, 2011, 11:23 AM »

I have said - more than once

I thought you would bring up this very old "company's attitude" topic again which really would be beating dead horses. Everything has been said at that time and it should not be brought up again in Tim's thread.

I apologize if I have misread your posting.

Which leaves me ruefully remembering I paid extra for the Pro version 7 to get it

This confuses me as the feature you desired was always working, including the free version. It was never disabled in any variation for the last 5 years since it has been introduced.

When sending out notifications, is there any way you can make it clear in the e-mail that it is a paid upgrade?

We actually do that at http://shop.phraseexpress.com and at http://new.phraseexpress.com. Also the update notification window in the software informs you, that it is a major new version and not a free but a paid upgrade. I am sorry, if you missed that and we will gladly make sure to make it more clear in the next version. We will add a counter to emphasize the nature of the upgrade, so it can't be "clicked away" so easily.

Your licensing is now slightly more complicated than it was, too, as I think you only used to have two versions, where you now appear to have three?

I fully agree with you. However, this was requested by many users. We would love to go with one version but users wanted different variations at different prices. However, you can quickly review the differences in the product feature matrix of the shop page.

I am not too sure from reading your postings about PhraseExpress whether you are still interested in it but I gladly would offer you a free upgrade to 8. Please contact us directly.

but its key feature that I haven't seen anywhere else is the ability to examine a corpus of pre-existing text (including Word docs) and work out a set of expansions based on it (..) IT gives you further tools for massaging the short forms so generated into whatever style you prefer.

The new PhraseExpress v8 offers both, too. Check out "Generate Autotext" and "Learn from text". In a slightly different fashion though. IT's greates feature is, that it takes sentences apart and offers fractions of a sentence for completion. This is the unique and distinctive feature. We only offer either complete sentences or single words.

Technically, it would be no rocket science for us to follow IT's approach. However, PhraseExpress is designed for office workers and general PC users and not only professional full-time transcriptionists. Normal users would be too disctracted by a permanent text suggestion box as in IT. And IT delivers just fine anyway.

As a final note: It is somehow difficult to handle PhraseExpress related issues/questions in another product's thread. On the one hand we don't want to appear that we would ignore any such question regarding our product as we consider any feedback very important. On the other hand, I also don't want to "hijack" other's threads for this purpose.

So, it would be great if you would contact us directly if anything is unclear about the features or open a separate posting to debate our company or products.

Thank you for your understanding and my apologies to Tim.

73

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« on: January 15, 2011, 04:41 PM »

Please note, that I did not came here to "promote our product" but to clarify incorrect statements about our product.

The thread is yours and I am off.

74

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« on: January 15, 2011, 04:16 PM »

Please right-click the item and you are set:



Problem solved!

By the way, this is no excuse but just for the records: What you have entered is a passphrase, not a password. We explain the resulting implication regarding the text prediction feature in the manual.

timns, you started bad-mouthing our product. You should stop it now, OK? It is for no good.

75

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« on: January 15, 2011, 12:36 PM »

But we should be able to laugh at ourselves.

Of course. The challenge with a text input helper is that it actually is serious business.

Users will certainly not appreciate if a utility reveals their passwords and may forget to smile if a guy's password named after his Ex pops up in front of his wive. ;-)