Create Your Easy-to-Use Abbreviations

Computers have undoubtedly increased their roles in our lives lately and, I think that we can all agree that, it is much easier and faster to type our texts on our PCs. The biggest advantage when doing so is that we can easily correct a mistake. Those who have to work with texts on a daily basis know how important abbreviations are. When you need to write a text and to have it ready fast, the benefits of typing three letters instead of a whole text are well acknowledged.

Breevy is a simple tool that comes to solve this problem. You can download and use this program for a trial period of 30 days. After that, you will be asked to purchase the application for $29.95. This software does not come with any special requirements, so it should work on any average computer.

Breevy’s interface is colorful and quite eye-catching but also easy to understand. Its ease of use will definitely satisfy the less advanced users. The application comes with a set of predefined abbreviations, but you can create your own, in accordance with your needs and desires.

[admark=1]When you want to create a new abbreviation, you will have to select the abbreviation text, the replacement text and adjust the Caps Lock sensitivity options. You can choose from case sensitive, insensitive or adapt replacement case to the one of the abbreviation. You can also choose the exact moment when you want Breevy to make the switch between the abbreviation and the typed text. You have a pretty wide palette of options to choose from.

You can select for the abbreviation to be converted immediately or set a trigger key to activate the replacement and the last option, to make the change after having typed the word-ending character.

The nice thing about this tool is that you can use the abbreviations to easily launch frequently used software. You just have to select the abbreviation, the case and, of course, the path to the program you want to launch. You will not find here the adapt replacement case option because this option wouldn’t really make a difference anyway. But you can set the same abbreviation written in capital letters (or not) to launch different applications. This option will help you launch your programs while typing a text and implicitly helps saving a lot of time.

Another interesting thing is that you can select the option to launch the selected applications as an administrator. This option is very useful for the programs that you know they require administrator rights to run. This option will basically save you the time to manually look for the application and select the Run as administrator option from the Explorer's menu.

You can also select to start your program normally, in the minimized or maximized mode.  We have tested this feature on a number of applications and we have to say that it doesn't work for all programs. However, the idea is good and can be improved in time.

Any parameters you want to pass to the launched program can be set in the special designated tab. This feature will enable you, for instance, to open a certain document when launching a text editor, like Notepad. The Run tab will let you select the working directory, where the program you want to launch is stored. You will find the moment of replacement feature with the same three options that we mentioned before.

Breevy’s developer has thought of the people that use the Internet a lot and offers them the opportunity of launching a webpage with this tool. You will have to enter, of course, the abbreviation, the URL that you want to launch and the browser to be used. The program will automatically locate all the browsers that are installed on your computer.

We have tested this feature with the most used browsers out there: IE, Firefox, Maxthon , Opera and Google Chrome. The feature that shows you the exact moment of the replacement is a very useful one, given the fact that you might type webpages in your text and not necessarily want to launch them. To help you with the management, you can add a short description to your link.

If you are interested in creating a backup for your abbreviations you can export them by using the special option in the File menu. In case a disaster occurs, you can import them back with the help of the same menu.

In the File menu, you will find the option to import some built-in abbreviation lists like typo auto correction, medical transcription set, a Shorthand dictionary or examples. The Shorthand dictionary files have the extension SPF and are files composed by using the Shorthand application that enables you to create your own system of abbreviations. These options will provide some default abbreviation that users might find really useful. Especially the medical transcription set, which is very complex in itself, might be very handy for the ones that have to type medical papers.

One of the very nice things that you will most likely observe is that you can use this software in all the major applications that you need on a daily basis. It behaves very well whether you are typing in Notepad, Office or even in your e-mail client (we have tested it on Thunderbird). You will certainly appreciate the fact that Breevy's developer has thought of making the application as usable as possible. The program also adds hyperlinks when they are required. However, with the new Office 2010 some problems might appear. The older versions of Office behave very well though.

The Preferences window will offer you the possibility to adjust the application to your needs. You can set the default case mode for new abbreviations or the default time of replacement. The trigger key can also be selected in this window. Another thing that you can select here is the word ending characters or the launchpad hotkey.

In order to have an up-to-date application, you can set for it to automatically check for updates with a certain frequency. If you want to be sure that Breevy is available anytime, you can select for the program to start with Windows.

Another interesting feature that this program offers you is that you can easily search for a certain abbreviation with its specialized search tool that can be found in the main window of the application.

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