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Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?
Darwin:
PhraseExpress looks interesting. Fair comments about AW. I wax and wane on the issue of its speed - at the moment I am quite pleased with it. It's not that it runs faster or slower at times, it's my perception that changes... As for the developers not issuing updates - there have been three since I bought it - two this year with the most recent being about a week ago. Granted, these are not point releases but the programme is being worked on.
Funny, I read the article you linked to over the summer and have actually had the same experience, though I returned to the fold. I had to uninstall AW at one point because of a conflict with another app that I was trialing. In the end, I left it off my machine for about six months. I survived without it but when I got around to installing it again it was like welcoming an old friend. I get the author's "big picture" point about activation but don't really see that it's an issue with AW. Anyway, in my usage it's well behaved - doesn't hog resources - and does what it's been advertised to do. I've never had a crash with it and it hasn't failed me. My biggest complaint would be that it opens quite slowly when set to start at system startup (but inexplicably opens quickly when opened on its own after the system has started). This seems to be a sporadic issue based on my perusal of the forums.
tim254:
I'm going to take a look at Direct Access too. Two things that really bothered me about Active Words was it's lack of auto completion of commands especially in the Action Pad and no confirmation if you entered in an invalid command. That drove me nuts because some apps took a couple of seconds to launch, and by that time I had tried to launch it several times ... or I sit there and wait if I entered an invalid command ... and nothing happens. It also loads a bunch of exe files in memory and the interface for editing the key words is slow and looks bad.
Another decent blog post about ActiveWords:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/03/24/streamline-typing-with-text-substitution/
Even after saying all that ... I might try it again anyway, since they added support for some really cool apps, like MindManager and ClearContext. However, I'll still use Launchy to launch apps.
Darwin:
DirectAccess has promise. I'd like to see greater configurability of the trigger and it's resource usage tamed a bit (it's not that bad, but is about 10-15% greater than AW). Where AW has a number of exe's running on my machine, DA fields only one, but it hovers in the 50MB or RAM range constantly, whereas AW is somewhat lower (at the moment it's using 37588K of RAM spread over four exes). To be fair, I've just closed AW and opened DA. All I've done is open it and close the main window, which appears at startup and I that it started at 46000K of RAM and change and has risen to 50,004K where it seems stable, for now. It's much prettier than AW and launches files and exes much more quickly. I've no experience using either for boilerplate text insertion because I don't use that feature. DA is not as well behaved when it comes to triggering it - AW recognises the word that you type and, if you provide the trigger, opens whatever you specified and deletes the word that you used to trigger the action. In DA this works right up to deleting the word at which point DA for some reason does not always delete the word, sometimes it deletes the whole thing, sometimes not at all and at other times (as just happened here) all but the first letter. This is kind of annoying when you're typing a letter and decide to laucnh something else. Another issue has arisen as I've written this: I had DA set to trigger when I hit the spacebar (just as I have it setup in AW - though I hit spacebar twice to trigger in AW) and note that I have three instances of word open! [I've also had to come back in here and retype word in three times]. THis is what I was getting at about making triggering a word more configurable. For now, I've switched from spacebar to enter as my trigger. Note that the result of triggering word three times is that memory usage has crept up to 55,596K...
A final note about memory usage is that when I am runnning AW my OVERALL memory consumption seems much lower than when I am running DA - out of proportion to the memory consumed by DA itself. Weird. The difference in overall memory consumption is 50-60 MB. Of course the AW total was before Word had been opened three times, so this may not be fair at all. However, this has been my impression each time that I've done this comparison. Total memory free right now (according to Maxthon's counter in the information bar at the bottom of my screen) is 254MB with DA running. I'm closing DA and launching AW right now... The total in the information bar is 301MB. After launching word three times via AW: 239MB with all instances of word running and 311 MB after I've closed them all. I realise that I'm obsessing about memory consumption and that these figures probably mean less than I'm trying to read into them, but still...
Overall, DA seems to have the speed and aesthetic advantage but AW has an advantage in overall feature set and resource usage.
Oh - just took a look at the link you posted and like your points in that discussion. I haven't had any trouble with typing incorrect active words - I have the monitor bar set to dock at the top of my screen but to autohide. Whenever I type and activeword, I get a drop down text balloon that says first ActiveWord Recognized and if I hit my trigger it changes to ActiveWord Processing. Thus, if I don't see this, I know that I've entered my ActiveWord incorrectly. Your list of suggestions, such as drag-and-drop to create AW, is great - all great ideas that would extend it, in my opinion.
Darwin:
PS I am running DA again and AFAICT, there is no autocomplete and no indicator that you've entered a command incorrectly. Like AW, however, when you type a command it pops up a dialogue box requesting that you confirm the command by typing the trigger. If you type something else, the dialogue just disappears. Thus, if you type the command incorrectly, you won't see that dialogue popup... Note, too, that both AW and DA will play a sound when a command is recognised.
tim254:
I'm testing out AW again and I like your tip about Auto-hiding the AWMonitor ... that definitely helps. I'm using Actual Windows Manager now too, which helps stop ActiveWords from adjusting it's word base screen which also drove me nuts (really need an explorer type view). So, I'm back testing it again. What do you use AW for now?
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