MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi. This is Gary with MacMost Now. Today lets take a look at how we can use the almost ubiquitous spell check, throughout many applications in Mac OS X. So back in the day, when you used a word processor, when you were done you would use the spell check function. And it would go through all the words in your document that it thought were spelled wrong. But things have gotten a lot better. Now it actually spell checks while you write. Even better than that, there is now spell check in the operating system, inside a Mac OS X Leopard, that will check spelling in all sorts of applications. Not just word processors. Lets take a look. So here we are inside of text edit. And I’m gonna type some text. Now, it’s put a red line. Underneath this word here, I’ve accidentally typed a second T. And if I roll over it, it will tell me this word was not found in the spelling dictionary. I can control click on it, and it will actually give me spelling suggestions right here at the top, of what it thinks the word may be. In addition I can choose ignore spelling, or learn spelling. Choosing learn spelling will put it in my custom dictionary on my Mac, so it will remember the word for next time. I can also go ahead and look it up in the dictionary if I like. So let me try something else. I can see here, it’s underlined MacMost. Now I want it to remember that this is in fact a fine word. So, instead of clicking one of these variations, I’m going to click learn spelling. And now it won’t bother me ever again when I type the word MacMost.
Now I have some other options as well. For instance, I can select the edit menu in text edit, and a lot of other applications, and see that there’s a spelling and grammar sub-menu. I can show the spelling and grammar now, check the document now. Because sometimes the operating system gets a little behind if you’re typing a lot of text, or you’ve just pasted a large block of text in. I can have it check spelling while I type, which is on my default. I can also have it check grammar. The grammar isn’t as useful as the spelling, as it usually makes suggestions that aren’t as helpful. But it can actually prevent you from typing something wrong that you didn’t intend, because it will catch it as a grammar mistake. So it might be useful to have on if you have a lot of writing.
Now this also works in a lot of other applications. For instance, here in mail, I am going to start a new document. And I am going to type something right here. And you can see it did the same thing here when I mistyped this word. And I get the same menu when I control click on it. It even works in the browser. For here at MacMost, if I want to go ahead and leave a comment, I can start typing. And you can see I forgot to put a space between is and A, and it has put a red line under it. And I can right click on it. And you get suggestions under spelling through the whole bit. So, it even works inside of web forms, which is very useful. So you really don’t have any excuse to have a misspelling in a comment or blog post anymore.
So we’ve see how you can add a word, using the learn menu option. But how do you remove one that you’ve accidentally added? Well, there’s no good way. You can go to your user folder, library, and spelling, and see a different file for every language that you’re using. So for instance, here is English. Double click on that and I’ll see all the words I’ve added. But unfortunately there’s hidden character between the words. So there’s no real good way to edit this file in text edit. You can use a more advanced editor like Text Wrangler, or BBEdit, if you’ve downloaded and installed any of those. You can also edit in them terminal window using one of those terminal editing programs if you know how to use them. Otherwise, you can always just delete this file and start fresh.
So there’s a quick look at the built in spell check inside of Mac OS X. Just about any software supports this. So it’s very easy for developers to incorporate this in their applications. So you can look for it just about everywhere. And the great thing is, if it learns a word like MacMost, you’ll find that it knows that word in every application that you type in.
Everyone in the United States have a great Thanksgiving. And remember, with every Thursday comes a new edition of the MacMost email newsletter. You can subscribe to it at MacMost dot com slash newsletter. I’ll be putting one out tomorrow, even though it’s Thanksgiving. So take a look. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.