Fingertips

The End of Fingertips

As of June 30th, 2024, Fingertips is no more.

Blame it on the new European Product Liability Directive (PLD). Its phrasing makes it really, really unattractive to share any further versions of Fingertips with the world.

Curious about more details? Dive into these reads:

From our side, a huge thanks to everyone who’s shared their joy and thumbs-ups with us!

 

Other Tools You May Want To Try

Fortunately, there seem to be quite a few other tools that you might want to try:

◼️ https://alternativeto.net/software/fingertips/?platform=windows

◼️ https://alternativeto.net/category/utilities/application-launcher/?platform=windows

◼️ https://alternativeto.net/category/productivity/text-expander/?platform=windows

 

Use Delphi to Convert Your Fingertips Files to XML

After installing the Delphi Trial Version, use the following instructions (no programming needed) to convert your Fingertips files to text-based XML files.

The resulting XML file with actions can be read by Excel right away, as one Fingertips user who tried this mentioned —thanks, Marcel! The XML file with phrases may require some editing (remove emoji that aren’t recognized as valid XML characters), and then Excel should also be able to read it.

These steps should be helpful:

  1. Locate the Fingertips database files that you want to export.
    1. Their default location is My Documents/Fingertips
    2. You’re probably most interested in these two files: Fingertips.Actions.db and Fingertips.Phrases.db.
  2. Create a new folder somewhere on your computer and name it ‘Backups’.
  3. Make a copy of each of the files you want to export to this new Backups folder. Do not use the original files for the rest of this process!
  4. Rename the copies of these files (in the ‘Backups’ folder), so they end in ‘.cds’ instead of ‘.db’. In other words, change their file extensions from .db to .cds
  5. Now download and install the Delphi Trial Version
  6. Start a new project from the main menu: File | New | Windows VCL Application – Delphi
  7. You should see an empty form in the middle of your screen, and a Palette window to the right of your screenIf you don’t see the Palette to the right, use View | Tool Windows | Palette, once again from the main menu.
  8. The Palette window has a search bar at the top. Use it to find the TClientDataSet component, by typing the phrase ‘tcl’.
  9. Double click the TClientDataSet component in the list on the Palette window, or drag and drop the TClientDataSet component from the Palette window to the form.
  10. Right-click the ClientDataSet1 component on the form and from the popup menu choose the item ‘Load from MyBase Table…’
  11. In the Open dialog, navigate to the new ‘Backups’ folder you created in step 2 above.
  12. In the dropdown box at the bottom right (just above the Open and Cancel buttons), select the option Client Dataset (*.cds).
  13. Select one of the backup files you created, Fingertips.Actions.cds or Fingertips.Phrases.cds and press the Open button.
  14. Right-click the ClientDataSet1 component on the form once again, and from the popup menu choose the item ‘Save to MyBase XML UTF8 Table…’
  15. In the Save As dialog, specify the name of the new XML file you want to create, for instance Fingertips.Actions.xml or Fingertips.Phrases.xml and press the Save button. You now have a copy of your backup in human-readable XML format, ready to be converted to something that’s even more useful to you.
  16. Take the same steps (from number 10 above) for the other file you want to convert.
  17. That’s it. Easy peasy.

A Little Programming

If you’d like to try your hand at a little computer programming, then just add both a TButton and a TMemo component to the form (also from the Palette).

  • Double click the TButton component to enter the code editor in the Button1Click(Sender: TObject) method.
  • Change that code block to this:

    procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
    var
    i: integer;
    begin
    with ClientDataSet1 do
    begin
    First;
    while not(Eof) do
    begin
    for i := 0 to FieldCount - 1 do
    begin
    Memo1.Lines.Add(Fields[i].AsString);
    end;
    Memo1.Lines.Add('-------------------------');
    Next;
    end;
    end;
    end;
  • Press F9, save all the files you just created in Delphi and run your new application.
  • In your application, press the button on the form, then see all the data from your Fingertips commands or phrases appear in the Memo component on your screen in an even more readable format than XML.
  • Of course, you can copy/paste that text from your new little program to another tool.
  • Or you can play around with the Button1Click method, change the formatting of how the text shows up in the Memo component, update the component and files names to something useful and turn it into something real.
  • Enjoy!