some news
First release of the New Year comes charging at you bearing the golden-toned god Aspell in a boilerplate chariot... that's right kids, spell check is now a standard feature on most textareas. Want to see how it works? Post a comment to this newsflash.
Want the source? Get it from the release page.
A few months ago I wrote a PHP-based spellchecker which you can find here. It uses GNU Aspell so you know the backend is solid, and it's pretty good at coming up with suggestions for misspelled words. I wouldn't stake my reputation on it (okay, I might, but you shouldn't) but it works. It was fun to code. And it turned out to be incredibly simple to integrate into Berylium.
Anyway, spell check was the final checkpoint on the Body and Shine 2002 development cycle, so this will probably be the final release pre-1.0. You might have noticed that I'm not using version numbers per se, but 1.0 is a sort of magical designation meaning "ready for initial public consumption." I'm quite sure no one but me is going to be using it, of course, but by the time I release 1.0 I'll be pretty confident that they could!
The next week will be all about documentation, code cleansing, and testing. Must. Do. Security. Audit. Ick.
Spell check demonstration:
Type some text as if you were going to post a comment below. Then double-click within the textarea-- if all goes according to code, a popup window will open that lets you spellcheck and correct the text. When you're done, click the paste button in the popup and the corrected text will magically replace the uncorrected text of your comment. It could be slicker, but how?
By Chris Snyder on January 5, 2003 at 1:14am