Ever since I rebuilt Text Case around the concept of user-built flows, I’ve always been missing one key part of the original version, the list of all of the formats with instant previews. It might have been long, and maybe with big bits of text it took a second or two to transform into every format. But it was really useful to not only transform text quickly, but to also see it in various formats at once.
That’s why, I’ve decided to add back that feature, but in a new slightly new guise.
There’s now a new “Scratchpad” tab in Text Case, which allows you to enter text at the top, and then see the results of it being formatted using all of your custom flows, and also every single format available in Text Case!
At the same time, there’s also a new button in the Flows section to add a single Format. This is when you want to have your own custom list of formats, but you don’t really want to build a full flow.
And I couldn’t stop there without also adding a few extra colour options for flows, and also some extra visual tweaks all throughout the app.
Text Case 2022.2 has just been released. It’s a relatively minor update, as the main reason for it was to fix 2 bugs. But I still threw in two new formats that have been requested.
As for the new formats, they are:
Replace “X” with Line Breaks
Replace Line Breaks with “X”
Relatively simple, but I’ve been getting quite a few requests, so I thought I’d add them in. These new formats are available when building a flow, and also via new actions in the Shortcuts app.
And then for the bugs, one was a rather simple one that one of the formats wasn’t appearing in the formats list. But the other was rather annoying, and was specific to the macOS app, where when you selected the Settings tab, the app review prompt would appear. And it would happen every single time. So, thankfully that should be fixed too.
It’s the first update to Text Case this year, and to be honest the first one in quite some time. I’ll get on to that in a bit, but first I’ll go over what’s in this update.
Two fixes. Firstly to address the Guardian title case that wasn’t correctly following the rules where certain words are always lowercase. And secondly, to address the bug when searching the formats list and the empty section headers would still be present.
Refreshed dark mode . The previous dark mode took inspiration from other iOS apps when it was first designed, where it used a lot of jet black, and everything was very dark. But it’s always been a thing that I’ve not 100% been a fan of, so I took some time to soften the colours a bit, and I think it looks a lot better.
New accent colours. Text Case has always had a red-ish accent colour throughout the app. This colour was taken from the original app icon. However, the default icon changed back at the start of 2021 when 12 new variants were added. The new default icon featured a slightly different red, and a new blue colour. So for this update I’ve decided to adjust the accent colours to match this icon, which means in light mode the accent will be red, and the blue will be used for dark mode (which works well with the new dark mode I must say).
Support for Shortcuts on Mac. Definitely a finally. This has been long deserved, and I’m to be honest I’m surprised more people haven’t ben reaching out and asking for it. But it’s finally here, and I think it makes Text Case a much better option now for people who want their automations to work on all of their machines.
1 new format. This update wasn’t planned to be filled with new formats, but there was one that I was getting a few requests for, and that was to be able to remove line breaks from a piece of text. It’s relatively simple, so I thought I may as well add it now. There are a few more I have lined up that will be in a future release, I just wanted to get this update out sooner rather than later.
Download
This update is available now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!
So why has it been so long since the last update?
Okay, so it mainly comes down to one event. Which was pretty much self-inflicted, and probably shouldn’t have happened.
So, a few months ago I was playing around with Linux, and installing various distros on a partition on my Mac. This time I was testing out Pop!_OS, which is a relatively beginner-friendly distro, and seemed Mac friendly.
I created all the necessary partitions, making note of the macOS partitions to keep away from them, and I installed the OS. It went fine, and I was able to play with it, and spend some time installing a bunch of packages and desktop environments. And once I was a bit more comfortable, I decided to clear the partitions and reinstall the OS, and then use what I learned to make a cleaner configuration.
However, on the second install, the OS was written to the wrong partition. Somehow the macOS partition had been used instead. I’m 99.9% sure it wasn’t me, although if this was someone else doing it, I’d be 99.9% sure it was user error.
My Mac had essentially been wiped. Although, at this point I was relatively calm as I have my important documents in iCloud Drive, photos in iCloud Photos, and my development work hosted in GitHub repositories.
Except that last one wasn’t entirely true. For some reason, the work I did for the 2021.6 release of Text Case hadn’t been pushed. So the App Store version was actually ahead of the code.
This meant that before I could work on any new features, I’d have to rewrite the last update. The update contained 15 new formats, various adjustments, and a few bug fixes. On top of that, there was a slight issue I was having with Xcode where I had one framework causing me issues, because it was being linked in the Mac Catalyst app target, and also the macOS bundle which powers the macOS services support.
If you add in my laziness, and some irritation that I’d have to spend time on things I’d already finished, this work took longer than it did originally.
Eventually I had everything how it was in the 2021.6 release, and I got working on the new functionality that I mentioned above. Part of me was thinking that I should add more to the update to make it a bigger release, but with the big gap in time since the last update, I thought it was best to just get it out now. It’s not like I can’t update again in a few weeks.
So that’s the story. I’m certainly glad it’s over, and I’m sure some of you will find it funny. I’ve taken a few steps to make sure it won’t happen again, such as buying a NAS and setting up Time Machine, and also buying a second-hand ThinkPad to handle my Linux experiments. Hopefully that means Text Case can go back to being regularly updated with new formats and functionality.
TeestFlight is finally available for macOS, albeit a beta, so I’ve opened up the Text Case macOS beta. Feel free to join and test out the various Shortcut actions.
The last few updates to Text Case have mainly been bug fixes and refinements, but in this update, there are 15 new formats!
These formats fall into three categories - Hashing, JSON, and Counts.
Hashing
MD2
MD4
MD5
SHA1
SHA224
SHA256
SHA384
SHA512
JSON
Format JSON
Minify JSON
Counts
Count Characters
Count Characters (Excluding Whitespace)
Count Words
Count Lines
Count Lines (Excluding Blank Lines)
The formats list has also ben organised into groups, so finding the right format should also be easier.
Just to confirm, these new formats, along with every other format in Text Case are accessible from inside the app, the Shortcuts app, via the Share Extension, and also via Services on the Mac.
Download
This update is available now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!
A small update to Text Case has just been released to both the iOS and macOS versions, and this time it’s just a small collection of fixes.
To be specific:
There was an issue when using an empty clipboard with certain formats.
The Add Suffix format wasn’t working correctly.
In some situations, the Share Extension would regularly close after launch.
A few Title Case variants were not always capitalising adjectives correctly.
As you can see, not exactly the sort of features one may wish for.
However, now these issues should be resolved, the focus can now switch back to more interesting features. For example, I have a few formats in mind that I want to add next. Some involving regular expressions, which should be fun.
Download
This update is available now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!
Text Case 2021.3 is a relatively small update, but it brings a few features that users have been desperate for, ever since the major 2021.1 release.
That update introduced the concept of building custom flows, but the flow creator was quite restricted. For example you couldn't easily reorder formats, and also for more complex formats that required custom parameters, there wasn't a way to edit these parameters afterwards.
Fortunately this update fixes both of those limitations. So you can both reorder and edit formats in the flow creator UI.
Additionally to those improvements, I also spent time rewriting the title case logic. That's not going to be something anyone directly cares about. But it allowed me to orient the title case formats around defined rules, and therefore made the process of adding new variants much easier.
Therefore, I've added four new title case variants:
AMA Title Case (American Medical Association)
Bluebook Title Case
New York Times Title Case
Wikipedia Title Case
This means that Text Case now supports 9 different title case variants. Which if you're interested in, you may want to read the post I wrote recently "The Various Types of Title Case" where I go into detail on all nine.
To top it all off, there is one more new format, Italics. Which means you can now do Bold, Italics, and Bold-Italics in the app.
Download
This update is available right now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!
As you may or not know, I’m the developer of Text Case, a text-transformation utility app for iOS and macOS. The app now supports tons of various pre-defined transformations and allows the creation of custom transformations, however, the app was originally based around one format, title case.
As the name suggests, title case refers to the capitalisation of text that is to be used as a title. But it’s not something that has an objective set of rules. Instead, it’s more of a rule that’s based around personal style choices.
The most popular title case standards I’ve heard of are AP (Associated Press), APA (American Psychological Association), and CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style), but there are countless more.
And including the next planned release for Text Case, it will support a total of 9 different title case variations. Some are quite similar, however, as people like to stick to certain standards, I think it’s important that there’s a lot of options in the app. And since I’ve had a few questions in theist asking what the difference is, I thought I’d write a post to explain the implemented rules.
Please note, the implemented formats aren’t carbon copies of the official standards, as some of the rules aren’t exactly feasible to build into an automated tool. For example, a few standards have the rule to keep the second part of a Latin species name lowercase, and AMA seems to have a few rules based around greek letters.
But from the perspective of Text Case, here is how each of them is implemented:
American Medical Association (AMA)
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise major words.
Do not capitalise coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet).
Do not capitalise articles (a, an, the)
Do not capitalise prepositions of three or fewer letters.
Associated Press (AP)
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise major words.
Capitalise all words of four letters or more.
Do not capitalise articles, conjunctions, or prepositions of three or fewer letters.
American Psychological Association (AP)
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise the first word after a colon.
Capitalise nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns.
Capitalise all words of four letters or more.
Do not capitalise articles, conjunctions, or prepositions of three or fewer letters.
Capitalise the second part of hyphenated major words.
Bluebook
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise the first word after a colon.
Capitalise all words except articles, conjunctions, or prepositions of four letters or fewer.
Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Capitalise all conjunctions except coordinating conjunctions.
Do not capitalise articles of prepositions.
Do not capitalise “as” in any grammatical function.
Guardian
Capitalise all words except for “a”, “an”, “and”, “at”, “for”, “from”, “in”, “of”, “on”, “the”, “to”.
Capitalise the first word after a colon.
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions.
Do not capitalise articles, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions.
Capitalise the first word after a colon.
New York Times
Capitalise nouns, pronouns, and verbs.
Capitalise all words of four or more letters.
Capitalise “no”, “nor”, “not”, “off”, “out”, “so”, and “up”.
Do not capitalise “a”, “and”, “as”, “at”, “but”, “by”, “en”, “for”, “if”, “in”, “of”, “on”, “or”, “the”, “to”, “v.”, “vs.”, and “via”.
Wikipedia
Capitalise first and last word.
Capitalise verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions.
capitalise prepositions of five letters or more.
Do not capitalise articles, prepositions of four letters or fewer, and coordinating conjunctions.
Hopefully this has answered some questions that people have regarding the different title case variants. But if you have any more, then I’d be very willing to hear them. And if you spot something that isn’t right, then please let me know!
It’s not been long since the major update to Text Case was released, introducing things like custom flows and complex formats. But it’s already time for another update that will bring a long desired feature, macOS Services.
macOS Services
All 48 formats can be accessed on the macOS app via the Services menu.
They apply the format directly to the selected text, which means no extra action is required. And since they are services, you can add a custom keyboard shortcut to them!
Unfortunately, I do need to add a caveat to this: It appears there is an issue with Catalyst based macOS apps where they do not support app-based text replacement services, where the services work up to the transformation happening, but the Catalyst app not taking the result and replacing the text.
New Formats
It’s not just a macOS update for Text Case, as all versions of the app now receive another 11 formats:
Title Case (Guardian)
Bold (serif)
Bold (Sans-serif)
Italic Bold (Serif)
Italic Bold (Sans-serif)
Script
Gothic
Letters in Squares (Filled)
Letters in Squares (Outline)
Letters in Circles (Filled)
Letters in Circles (Outline)
Tweaks
Small Caps now only applies the transformation to already lowercase characters.
Bug Fixes
Fixed Copy to Clipboard button.
Fixed the bug where certain HTML elements would be omitted in the Markdown to HTML format.
Download
This update is available right now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!
