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Comment by jnsie | Hacker News Reader

What is the benefit of this over something that works system-wide, such as Textexpander?

It seemed pretty clear to me from the description that this thing will let scripts read from Chrome to, e.g., pull in names from what you are looking at on LinkedIn and also make web requests.

But OP and Text Blaze should take your question as great feedback: by simplifying to "programmable snippets", it sounds like just a dumb automation tool to reduce typing. We saw that stuff yesterday on HN with people using AutoHotKey and similar.

Make it more clear what you offer!

Agreed. I went to their homepage and it highlights dumb automation (which is valuable, but everyone is doing already) over transforming web content. For instance, the image halfway down the page is a standard text replacement scenario (replace /ty with "Thank you...."). They need to focus on their differentiator and not try to reinvent the text expansion wheel (especially on a single browser)

We definitely have a lot of work to do when it comes to marketing. One key challenge is tailoring the massage to the audience. While the HN audience would understand transforming web content and understand the value in it, most support reps won't. One thing we're working on is different landing pages for different functions. That should allow us to highlight benefits that are relevant for the audience.

I discussed our dynamic features a bit in an earlier comment, but I want to highlight what a Chrome focused extension offers over a system wide app.

As a Chrome extension, Text Blaze can use the contents of the webpage you are on in your snippet.

For example, if you replied to an email in Gmail, the following Text Blaze snippet would pull in the name of the person you were replying to automatically (the bit after the `selector=` is a CSS selector):

```

Hello {site: text; selector=.h7:last-child .gD},

...

```

CSS selectors are much too technical for most users and this one in particular is quite ugly, but we are planning on developing higher-level functionality to make this much more accessible in the future.

Appreciate the response! I think you should hammer this home on your homepage. There are a bunch of text expansion apps out there but I'm unaware of any that can do _this_.

On a side note, a few images weren't loading when I opened your homepage in Safari just now.

Agreed! Once we have the higher-level functionality for this in place it's something we'll really focus on as it's a killer feature.

For now though it's too technical for most users (outside HN of course) so it's not something we focus on.

Thanks for flagging the Safari issue, we'll look into it.

I agree. I just wanted to post "Why would I not use https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso instead?", but that Selector thingy is a really nice idea.

Agreed, I use the snippet function of Alfred after I tried textblaze but now that I know of dynamic snippets I’m really curious to give it a second look.

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