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Text substitution is a convenient option for quickly composing documents without needing to learn special methods for accessing symbols or full names or phrases that you regularly use.

This option is so commonly used that OS X has a central text substitution service that you can set up in the system preferences; however, not all programs are built to use this. Unfortunately many word processors, such as Microsoft Word and Apple's Pages, do not use central text substitution services, and instead incorporate their own text substitution options. As a result, if you set up text substitution in the OS … Read more

A Google effort to promote its Chrome browser misfired with the appearance of some blog posts that fly in the face of Google's own attempts to discourage low-quality Web content.

The campaign, spotted yesterday by Aaron Wall at SEOBook, is apparent in several blog posts from late December bearing the label, "This post is sponsored by Google Chrome." But there appears to be some backtracking now that the campaign is under scrutiny, and Google itself is disclaiming responsibility while trying to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The theme of the posts is evident in their titles: &… Read more

Google+ has captured more than 62 million users, at least according to one "unofficial" count.

Chiming in with his own Google+ post yesterday, Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen reported the latest numbers as of December 27.

Running queries on different surnames to gauge the number of total users, Allen and his team found a surge in daily signups over the past several weeks. Around 625,000 new users have been hopping aboard the social network each day, which means almost a quarter of all Google+ users joined in December alone.

Assuming that rate continues, … Read more

Over the weekend, a Facebook chat feature was revealed--one that allows you to use a profile picture to represent someone instead of simply typing their name. … Read more

In a move that is likely to raise more concerns about anti-competitive behavior, Google has begun listing its Google+ brand pages on its search engine results page.

The page listings, which were noted today by researcher BrightEdge Technologies but previously reported by All About Content, include promotional messages from the brands, producing what is essentially an advertisement for the brand, as well as Google's social network. The search engine listings seem to be appearing for only a few brands with Google+ pages, such as Macy's and AT&T.

A search for T-Mobile produces a Google+ brand listing … Read more

Google+ is giving its members a few stocking stuffers designed to enhance the social network.

Touted in Google's official blog today, the enhancements are part of an ongoing effort to make Google+ more effective and more user friendly.

One of the tweaks will let you customize your Google+ stream. The more people you follow, the more cluttered your stream can become, increasing the odds of missing important posts. To help unclutter your stream, a slider at the top of a particular circle will let you control how posts from that circle should mesh into the overall stream.

The red … Read more

If you are used to the Unix command line, then you will find yourself right at home with Apple's Terminal application in OS X. The tool launches bash as the default shell for user accounts, but you have the option of using others such as sh, zsh, and csh.

In addition to the shell environment, Apple offers a full set of BSD tools that enable you to script many tasks for automating just as you would on any Unix system.

The BSD library and other commands that Apple includes in its operating system are vast, and with hundreds of … Read more

Anyone out there employed by Facebook, Google, or Apple may like to know that your company is among the best places to work, at least according to your fellow employees.

In its fourth annual Employees' Choice Awards, company review site Glassdoor compiled the 50 best places to work for 2012 based on comments from more than 250,000 workers.

Accounting for several factors, including salary and benefits, work-life balance, the opportunity to advance, and how the CEO is doing his or her job, a number of tech companies made the list.

Facebook took third place with a satisfaction rating of … Read more

It would certainly be an interesting development if an app that lets people dress up their Facebook profiles to make them look more like My Space pages somehow led to Facebook's downfall.

That's probably unlikely. But The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel is reporting that profile-modification app PageRage is causing Facebook some angst.

That's because the free version of PageRage includes ads--ads that Facebook makes no money from, and that, in some cases, apparently obscure the ads from which Facebook does profit.

The PageRage advertisements are reportedly big and splashy and push products from major companies … Read more