PhraseExpress - Autotext Utility

[I am Baas]

@moderator
bartelsmediagmbh posted a spammy comment at http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.p ... mment24452

Please remove it.

[webfork]

From the PhraseExpress entry:

Sadly, a few individuals who may have been caught cheating our fair use license policy try to harm our reputation rather than taking responsibility for their license abuse. Which is a shame.

You can easily identify those people as they don’t provide evidence. We know why – The license notification in later PhraseExpress versions would debunk in plain English why it has been triggered.

Few problems here:

• Both IanFromBarrie and Abraxas both listed issues. I don't know if this user is pretending, but if the actual developer of this software were to come on the site and basically call two users "cheaters" seems pretty tone-deaf; users that don't provide evidence of what triggered the bad behavior are not necessarily going to contact the developers and try to defend themselves.
• Unless I absolutely loved a program I'm not going to jump through a bunch of hoops to keep it on my computer.
• "Screencap evidence"? That's supposed to get me a free copy of the program? Since when is a screencap evidence of anything? I bet I could make a screencap of PhraseExpress identifying "I hate capitalism" as commercial.

Anyway, I really don't think this kind of behavior makes any sense. Any commercial entity of any real size is very concerned with running unlicensed software and would frown on any users utilizing software in this way. This internal detection system seems wholly unnecessary and like the devs are just playing scrabble. Further, I'm very skeptical of the notion that certain text patterns necessarily constitute commercial activity: the only one I could think of off hand "Please sell me X shares of stock in X company" still isn't necessarily commercial.

That said, I'm not these developers and maybe this is really necessary and is really, really smart. Still, every time I type something into the program I get to think "does this sound commercial"? I think I'll get by on something less awesome rather than roll the dice on whether or not this is going to break on me down the road when I say the magic words.

[webfork]

bartelsmediagmbh posted a spammy comment at http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.p ... mment24452 Please remove it.

Given that the user's only link is pointing to the same website as the entry, I don't think this qualifies as spam. You mean the $699 bit?

[bartelsmediagmbh]

spammy comment

I am sorry if it appeared that way to you. It was not out intention to spam.

If you read our posting again, it will probably become clear, that we don't want to advertise/sell our software here but just want to motivate specific users to provide evidence for the claims they made about our software.

If the challenge is not appropriate, we have absolutely no problem to have that removed.

Any commercial entity of any real size is very concerned with running unlicensed software

What a wonderful world this would be for a software maker, if software piracy in pro environments wouldn't exist.

Further, I'm very skeptical of the notion that certain text patterns necessarily constitute commercial activity.

If you please read http://www.phraseexpress.com/freeware.htm , you would find, that PhraseExpress does not contain such text pattern verification (for a long time anymore).

Hope, this helps.

[I am Baas]

spammy comment

I am sorry if it appeared that way to you. It was not out intention to spam.

If you read our posting again, it will probably become clear, that we don't want to advertise/sell our software here but just want to motivate specific users to provide evidence for the claims they made about our software.

If the challenge is not appropriate, we have absolutely no problem to have that removed.

Thank you for explaining your position. The claims you are referring to were made about earlier versions of PhraseExpress (v9.0.167 and v9.1.5 I believe) but your challenge is for version "9.1.29 (or later)". That just did not make sense to me and hence the spam alert.

[webfork]

If you would please read http://www.phraseexpress.com/freeware.htm , you would find, that PhraseExpress does not contain such text pattern verification (for a long time anymore).

I'm confused then. What are the issues that Abraxas and IanFromBarrie saw if not something detected by a text pattern? Is that the old program? How does it, as you put it, get "triggered"? Just if it's running a Windows Server OS? I ask because I'd like to include those details clearly in the entry.

What a wonderful world this would be for a software maker, if software piracy in pro environments would not exist.

I think -- as with IanFromBarrie and Abraxas -- you're again minimizing a position. Companies DO listen and there is effort on this. Happy to provide more evidence (of BSA raids) if anyone who hasn't been reading slashdot needs it.

I'm not saying the BSA is a legitimate way to enforce copyright (it isn't), I'm saying we don't live in a world where nobody cares about piracy.

[smaragdus]

I have been using TyperTask for years and I still like it for its simplicity and elegance. But it does not support Unicode so I cannot type anything in my native language. PhraseExpress seems very powerful but I have had unpleasant experience using another "free" program by the same developer- Autotext, which after a period of time started to throw out donation nags so I cannot easily trust Bartels Media. More, I have read many comments about nag screens and time bombs, about slowly typed warnings, about messages showing how much money PhraseExpress has saved, etc. More- in their Freeware page they say that:

If using features reserved for one of the commercial editions, or if PhraseExpress is used in professional environments, license reminders are shown after 30 days.

but I could not find anywhere which features are free, nor could I find an option to disable the commercial features inside the program. So I would like to ask the community- has anyone used the program extensively, which features are allowed to be used for free, are there any nags and what triggers them? Customizing such a program needs lots of time and efforts and I do not want to waste my time doing it only to see nags, accusations of unfair use, notifications how much money the program has saved me, etc. I will appreciate any feedback.

[tproli]

I was terrified at the full price of PhraseExpress so I only tried it for its features, which are great btw. I also tried Breevy, which is less smart as PhraseExpress, but also commercial. I've also tried many free text expander but I always found something in them I didn't liked, so finally created a ClipJump addon called HotPasteHelper:

https://github.com/aviaryan/clipjump-ad ... asteHelper

Yes, it's pretty undocumented but if you're interested I can provide some details on how to use. And I can assure you it's no nagware and such

It has no GUI besides an autocomplete search/navigate box (see attachment), so adding keywords requires manual editing of its files. Otherwise it has most of the features the "big" players have. I'm using it for more than a year and never needed other.

[bartelsmedia]

@smaragdus: We asked multiple times about it but nobody in this thread ever provided a single evidence of a license reminder triggered by the current PhraseExpress version except as clearly advertised and explained.

When have you experienced a time bomb in PhraseExpress? When do you get a nag screen, please? When does PhraseExpress offends you with time saving messages?

Can you send screenshots including a step-by-step description, please?

If the feature set and terms and conditions of our freeware is not clear to you, why does your quote leave out exactly the section and link that would answer this question?

We would love to make it as clear as possible. Is there anything you wish we could do to make it clearer than quoted above?

[smaragdus]

@bartelsmedia

It seems that you did not read my message carefully.

I have never used PhraseExpress and I have never said that I have seen nags and warnings but because I have read comments about such incidents I asked the community for feedback since I do not want to invest time customizing PhraseExpress to my needs just to see nags and warnings one day in the future.

At your Shop page there is a feature comparison of Standard, Professional & Enterprise editions but there is no mentioning about the Free edition so it is nit clear which features are available for free.

I will show you a feature-comparison table of another commercial product where the features availability in the different editions is explained clearly and explicitly.

If you have listed clearly all Free features you would have helped the users a lot sparing them wasted time and frustration.

OK, I will invest some time testing PhraseExpress for a month and after that I will write about my findings here (with screen-shots and videos if needed).

[smaragdus]

@tproli

Thank you for letting me know about your HotPasteHelper add-on. Once I tried Clipjump but I didn't start using it because it lacked a simple paste menu showing all saved items like other clipboard managers (ArsClip, CLCL, Clibor, etc). Haven't you thought of creating a simple standalone text expander like TyperTask or you simply don't need it? In fact if TyperTask supported Unicode and if it was able to detect different keyboard layouts I would have been completely satisfied with it.

[tproli]

I just feel the price tag too high for such a small utility. This may not be an issue in a country with higher incomes but unfortunately this is not the case here. Of course if I would really need those extra features I could buy PE, but there are other alternatives and as I wrote above, I am fine with my own solution, even it's probably more buggy.

There's nothing special that requires HotPasteHelper to be bundled with ClipJump, I just started expanding its features and that's why it's "hosted" in ClipJump. I guess it would be easy to decouple but I'm fine how it is now.

ClipJump also has a history window (not menu), and a Find feature too, but I rarely use them, so it's not depend on that. Another nice free alternative is Lintalist but I guess you know that.

[Ennovy]

I used PhraseExpress a couple of years and I can confirm that I never saw any nag screens

[bartelsmedia]

I have never said that I have seen nags and warnings but because I have read comments about such incidents

We understand your concerns if you read anonymous comments, where a few of them have the sole intention to harm the reputation of our software.

PhraseExpress has more than 14 years of continuous development and more than a million downloads. Such success in a small niche can cause bad feelings for some.

You can see in your own reaction, how important it is for us, to immediately set false rumours straight.

Would you mind telling us the source of the "comments" you have read on the internet to get a better understanding?

[smaragdus]

I have tested PhraseExpress and as I have promised I will share my experience with the community.

During a month of excessive testing I never got any pop-ups or nag-screens. After the trial period was over I only got a registration screen:



After the trial period was over I continued to use PhraseExpress and I haven't seen a pop-up or a nag yet. If I get such stuff in the future I will post it here. The program is very good, my only complaint is that I couldn't find a way to disable update checks.

@bartelsmedia

Would you mind telling us the source of the "comments" you have read on the internet to get a better understanding?

Yes, it is no secret- I read comments about pop-ups, nags and time-bombs here, here (in the comments section) and here.

@tproli
Lintalist doesn't seem easy to use and that is why I haven't tried it so far.