Like everyone else who uses Apple Mail, I have to work with text in other ways too, to write reports, articles, papers and — my favourite — higher education policy memos.

So I am very interested in anything that promises to make working with text in Mail.app and elsewhere easier and more efficient. I’ve blogged here before about snippet and clipboard utilities like Textpander and CopyPaste, and apps that manipulate text more generally in useful ways like TextSoap.

Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus has written a very warm review of another text utility, Spell Catcher X, on MacObserver.

Titled “Who kneads spill chicken?”, the review outlines six reasons why you might shell out USD 40 for a spell checker when Mac OS X has a great one built-in.

I remember looking at this app eighteen months ago. It’s come on a long way since then, and will now catch DOuble CApitals, extra spaces, accidental doubble keystrokes and more, correct mistakes ‘on the fly’ or auto-suggest corrections if it can’t work out what you were trying to type.

It also contains a “glossary feature” for text snippets.

Spell Catcher X feels streets ahead of CopyPaste, both in terms of integration into OS X and its feature set.

Have a read of Dr Mac’s review and see if it might not save you more than USD 40 in time, sweat and tears.

Spell Catcher X is shareware (USD 40) and is available from the developer’s web site.

Similar Posts:

• Spell Catcher X Lite: Faster, cleaner, cheaper typing and snippets
• Mail.app annoyance in Spell Catcher X
• Betalogue on text replacement in Mail.app
• CopyPaste + yType 2.6.3
• Clear “mis-learnt” words from the spell-checker

Tags: Apple Mail, mail.app

This entry was posted on Sunday, 4th December, 2005 at 8:42 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Plug-ins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.