Auto-Correct Everywhere
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When I switched from a PC to a Mac, the third party application that I missed the most was a background-app called Autocorrect Plus. Like the Autocorrect feature in Microsoft Word, it would automatically expand abbreviated words into complete words, phrases, or even entire paragraphs.
Now, Peter Maurer — the genius behind Butler and Witch (See Quick Look entries covering both applications in the right-hand panel) has produced something similar for the Mac.
The graphic below shows some of the entries I've already set up via the Textpander preference pane.
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As well as replacing snippets with words, you can replace snippets with entire sentences, or images, or the current date or time. There's even the capability to nudge the cursor to a new position; so I could type qte and it would output opening and closing quote-marks, with the insertion point positioned between them.
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I've tried a couple of other apps that attempt the same expansion process — there are two very subtle features that make this one my choice though; the first is that once the shortcuts are set up there's no extra step needed to invoke them — just type, the other is the way it handles the clipboard. The clipboard is used to handle the expansion, but it then tidies up after itself by putting the previous clipboard contents back into play.