Ladies and gentlemen, I’m introducing you to Neil McDevitt who wrote this application review for iPhone.

Neil, a warm welcome and looking forward to more already.

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Pastie by Manicwave.com

Ever since my blackberry died and I replaced it with an iPhone, I’ve had the natural tendency to compare the features I’d gotten used to on the blackberry to the ones available on the iPhone. Generally, the iPhones features greatly surpass those on the blackberry except in one glaring place: composing messages and typing.

You’re probably saying, “duh, dude.. the iPhone doesn’t even have a real keyboard.”

Let me clarify. While the iPhone’s text correction feature is handy for helping me avoid misspelled words due to fat fingers, I’d used the blackberry’s auto-text feature to simplify many of my most common messages. In other words, I made extensive use of the blackberry’s mynumber or mypin auto-text shortcuts to automatically input the phone number or the PIN number. I also set the auto-text to convert OMWH to “On my way home”. You get the general idea.

One of my big annoyances with the default iPhone was the lack of a user-customizable auto-text application. It seems that Apple doesn’t like anyone creating a auto-text feature that could cause problems with its own correction features. Pastie (and its free Pastie Lite companion), a product by Manicwave.com tackles this problem and goes a step further. It gives users the ability to automatically create canned emails, SMS messages and copy/paste functionality.

Previously, if I wanted to let my wife know I was heading home, I had to:
1. open mail
2. create a message
3. start typing her name (usually 4 keystrokes)
4. Type “on my way home” (14 keystrokes)
5. Press send

That would be a total of 21 keystrokes, if you were counting.

With Pastie, I can do the same thing by:
1. Open Pastie
2. Click the pre-made and pre-assigned “on my way home” message
3. Press Send.

Obviously, 3 keystrokes is much faster than 21! How this works is the user customization screen. Quite simply, the screen asks three questions: Who will receive this, what is the message and how will you send it? You can send the message via email or SMS message. You can also set it to just copy/paste and this is great for saving information that you type frequently.

This is a great product because it’s just really simple to use. There’s no annoying popup screens or long loading times. Until yesterday, my major complaint was that it appended a “marketing message” even if I paid for the full version. This was removed after an update from AppStore. Pastie Lite keeps the marketing message and has a limit of 3 saved items.

However, Pastie does have a few shortcomings:

* Currently, a user has to actually press the send button to send the message. My thinking is the app should automate that process as well.
* The application doesn’t seem to have a way of handling multiple-line messages.

But overall, it’s a great way to shorten the process of sending the messages that we send on a daily basis.

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Price: $1.99 for full version, free for PastieLite
iTunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=324527519&mt=8