Wishlist: AutoText in Android like BlackBerry

If you’ve never had a BlackBerry, you don’t know some of the things you’re missing (and you’re definitely missing certain things to make productivity much easier).

One of the best things RIM has embedded in the BlackBerry OS is the AutoText feature, similar to Autocorrect in your favorite word-processing program that spots a certain misspelled word and corrects it just-like-that while you type away.

This feature — which comes pre-loaded as a way for you to correct common-errors — can be hacked to either remove annoying entries that you don’t use or add things that you spend your time repeating often.

For example, turn “brb” into “be right back” or “omw” into “on my way”.

Simply go into your Blackberry Options screen, choose Autotext, then type in the letters you’d like to use as a shortcut and then the text you’d like to replace it with when composing an email. (via and)

The AutoText feature in BlackBerry works in SMS and email, or you can disable it for the l33t.

One “advanced” use of this that I loved when I had my bb was adding complex items such as my work or home address, additional contact information or other things to the AutoText database I could easily send along. BBGeeks did a good write up on this:

The easiest way to accomplish this is to go find the “sig” entry. Edit the replace with field to reflect the signature you want to appear. The next time you type “sig” at the end of an SMS or email, your custom signature will appear. You can create multiple signatures by adding new entries to AutoText. For example, the letters K and T rarely appear adjacently. So you could create a new entry for “kt” and have it automatically change to a different signature. You can do this for anything, really — if you’re a literary type, perhaps you want a macro for “onomatopoeia.” Just set up a string of infrequently-used letters and bam, there’s your long string reduced to a short one.

For me, I would give these entries a prefix like “info”. For example, I would use “info-blog” to magically insert my blog’s url, “info-twitter” to give my twitter handle and more.