An new beta of Spell Catcher X — part spell-checker, part on-the-fly text-formatter, part text-snippet manager — has been released.

It is a terrific app, good enough to feature in the Hawk Wings’ Top Ten list of things every Mail.app user should have.

It has been recompiled as a universal binary, but also contains a number of bugfixes, improvements and new features.

A new option in the Interface preference pane offers the ability to turn off its autocomplete functions in particular apps. In Mail.app, for example, it can interfere with the typing of email addresses, seeking to change them to something else.

It also now quits in a more permanent way and the update procedure has been substantially streamlined so that it no longer requires a restart.

Improvements have been made to its launch speed and to its interactions with widgets. In addition, Keyboard shortcuts that clash with system-wide ones are detected.

Check ?¢‚Ǩ?ìword?¢‚Ǩ¬ù, Find ?¢‚Ǩ?ìword?¢‚Ǩ¬ù in References, and Look Up ?¢‚Ǩ?ìword?¢‚Ǩ¬ù now works more reliably in Carbon apps like Office 2004.

On the downside, the app no longer supports OS 10.2 (Jaguar) due to requirements for changed coding.

Many further improvements and bugfixes are listed in the “What’s New” document on the disk image.

The beta is available from the Rainmaker web site.

The developer Evan Gross recommends reading the “What’s New in 10.2.2″, “Read Me” and “Release Notes” documents that are on the disk image before installing.