CNET Editors' review
Spell Catcher is the modern-day descendant of a spell-checking app from ancient times (as a Desk Accessory called Thunder, from 1985), now with powerful, system-wide spell-checking and text-expanding features.
By default, this muscular app tracks every word you type on your Mac, across every application, and provides you with much more than the live visual feedback you get in separate apps with built-in spell-checking. Spell Catcher can give you automatic typo fixing, spoken alerts (for example, pointing out repeated words, or curious spellings with a quick "Curious!"), instant access to the dictionary and thesaurus (with support for multiple dictionaries and online sources), and serious text-expansion capabilities that let you set up an extensive "shorthand glossary" for frequently used words, phrases, or even multipage documents. Spell Catcher also includes a "Ghostwriter" feature, which can be a life-saver in the event of a crashed app or lost doc: it records all your keystrokes and saves those to a text file, which you can recover later.
For the most part, Spell Catcher runs invisibly in the background, but you can invoke its features directly through the app, using keyboard shortcuts, or through the Dock, Input, or Services menus. The initial setup for Spell Catcher can be time-consuming, getting its settings to match your preferred work flow and habits, but this app has excellent documentation, active forums, and a responsive developer. Note: now that Spell Catcher has been fully updated for Snow Leopard, version 10.3.4 is the last to support Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).
Publisher's Description
From Rainmaker Research:
Spell Catcher X is the powerful writing tool preferred by educators, students, writers, bloggers - anyone who writes on their Macintosh. It's the all-in-one writing solution for those who need standardized custom dictionaries for use in all their applications, those that write in multiple languages, and anyone that simply wants to be a faster, more effective writer. Use it in Mac OS X applications such as email, web browsers, instant messaging, Microsoft Word and other word processors, graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop, video and movie programs, databases, and spreadsheets.
What's new in this version:
- Worked around a bug in the version of WebKit.framework that gets installed along with Safari 5.0 that caused Spell Catcher's Look Up window to crash.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Spell Catcher X 10.3.5 where function keys without modifiers could not be set as keyboard shortcuts.
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All versions:
4.1 starsout of 66 votes
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Current version:
4.0 starsout of 1 votes
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My rating:
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Results 1-2 of 2
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"quick jumping between languages, still to clumsy."
Version: Spell Catcher X 10.3.6
Pros
Near to perfection for a frequent writer
Cons
As a Luxembourger I equally use French, German, English and Luxembourgis (here I switch spellchecking off) I have at least not discovered a satisfactory way to do these frequent swaps quickly and efficiently.
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"Great application. Great support."
Version: Spell Catcher X 10.3.6
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
I've been using Spell Catcher for roughly 10 years.
With support for multiple languages, dictionary, thesaurus, quick text manipulation, and text expansion (Shorthands), and more, this is a must-have application for me.
On the rare occasion when I have needed customer support, Evan has been great. Highly recommended.
Results 1-2 of 2
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