Writing On Your Palm

00/09/11 - Can't Spel? No probelm!

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It's the curse of the modern age. With the advent of heavy computer use, everyone seems to have forgotten how to spell. You can practically hear the brains atrophying. Not that I'm any better than anyone else. Regular readers of this column know all too well that the occasional typo or outright misspelling slips past my eagle-eyed editor (me, minutes before my posting deadline). On a desktop system, I'd have the spell checker built into my word processor to alert me to creative spelling (although I think those squiggly red lines in Word are the worst distraction writers have ever had to deal with), but since I write almost entirely on my Palm, I'm just stuck, right?

No. There are, in fact, a few options for the spelling challenged Palm users, and some of them are quite useful.

The best of the bunch (and which I registered over the course of researching this column) is SpellMan, by StandAlone Software. It's not a Hack, but it does patch itself into the OS on its own to work in every application (much like WordComplete, Jot, keyboard drivers, etc.) and it seems pretty stable. There was no system speed degradation that I could see.

Once installed, SpellMan watches as you type (or write, for the keyboard underprivileged) and compares each word to the word list database. By default, it just beeps when it sees an unknown word, and there's virtually no performance hit for this. In fact, it's surprisingly effective, since it flags typos while they're still fresh in your mind. Optionally, you can set it to automatically pop up a list of suggested words when it hits an unknown word, but this is slow, not to mention annoying. A better solution is to correct anything obvious when you hear the beep, but otherwise wait until you're done with your typing to spell check. When you're ready, just tap on the rightmost edge of the screen, and SpellMan goes to work. When it hits a word it doesn't know, it pops up a menu that allows you add the word, ignore it, or replace it with a list of alternatives. It's fast, convenient and it works in any standard PalmOS text entry field, even in peditPro 32k memos.

So what's the downside to SpellMan? It doesn't check contractions properly, stopping at the apostrophe. The additions to the word list are stored in the same word list databases (a-m and n-z) as all the other words, so whenever you add a word, your next hotsync is going to take a long time as this huge file is backed up again. SpellMan only works in standard PalmOS text fields, so it doesn't work in programs that bypass the Palm API, like MegaDoc (not that there's any fix for this, and it's really MegaDoc's shortcoming). Other than that, this is a great program, and well worth the money.

174If for some reason SpellMan doesn't float your boat, there's SpellCheck, by Evolutionary Systems. I should note right up front this is risky software. So risky, in fact, that Evolutionary Systems goes out of their way to convince you not to buy it. (It's the website equivalent of it being "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.' ") They'd much rather sell you NoteTaker, which has the same spell checking engine embedded into a stand-alone application that replaces Memo Pad. Fine if all you edit are memos, but it leaves us pedit, QED, TakeNote, SmartDoc, etc. users in the cold. They'll sell you SpellCheck, but they won't be happy about it, and the sale is conditional on your agreement that if your Palm catches fire, causes sterility or otherwise ruins your life, it's your own damn fault for ignoring their warnings and using the software anyway.

That said, it's not that bad. It does a decent job of spell checking, and it does a better job than SpellMan of handling contractions and suffixes (it lists "spelling" as "spell.ing", so you can choose if you want the root word or the whole thing). Unlike SpellMan, it doesn't check on the fly, and it doesn't seem to skip known words when checking the document (are you sure you spelled "it" correctly?). It's a nice try, but SpellMan is just more convenient.

CorrectHack is a very fast, convenient alternative, but it requires that you know what words you're going to misspell before you misspell them. It doesn't check spelling against a full wordlist, but rather checks against a list of common misspellings that you generate manually. If you know you have a tendency to spell "the" as "hte", this will automatically fix it on the fly. CorrectHack is very fast and efficient, but it's not really a spell checker so much as a way to catch your known problem typos. If that's all you really need, this is much smaller and quicker than some of the other options listed here.

From CIC, the folks that brought you Jot, we have WordComplete. Technically, this isn't a spell checker either, but it works pretty well on the assumption that you can't misspell a word if you don't have to enter it yourself. WordComplete pops up a little box, either near the cursor or right above the Graffiti area, that contains the words that match the letters you've already written. You can configure how many words show up in the list, and how many letters to wait before the list appears. For spell checking, I usually configure it to show only two or three words, and to only display words of six letters or more. WordComplete is pricey at $25, but it does the job it's designed for quickly and efficiently.

Last on the list is Thesaurus, from DDH Software, the same folks that make the popular database HanDBase. In addition to it's primary function as a thesaurus, this program has a nifty spell check function. If you have a word you're not sure about, copy it into the clipboard and then run Thesaurus. If you set Thesaurus to start in spell check mode, it will read the word in the clipboard and tell you if it's spelled correctly, or suggest alternatives if the word is misspelled. Select a corrected word and it's copied into the clipboard. Then you go back into the app in which you were writing and paste it in.

That sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But it's not hard to streamline. If you map Thesaurus to the Calc silkscreen button (via the Buttons screen in your Prefs) and use the freeware PhlemHack to quickly switch back to recently-used applications, using Thesaurus isn't that bad. The only downside, really, is that you have to know a word is questionable to begin with. If you're pretty good at knowing that a word doesn't look right, this could work.

Bottom line, though, is that none of these programs beat SpellMan for speed, power and convenience. For its quick spell checking in any text field and on-the-fly warnings of unknown words, SpellMan gets my Best of Breed for Palm spell checkers.

Next week, I'll have a detailed blow by blow of Microsoft's "PocketPC: Wireless and Beyond" conference, and my take on how the PocketPC really stacks up against the Palm for mobile writing. See you then.

Jeff Kirvin
jkirvin@yahoo.com