Basic Info
Intro:The thesaurus, something once confined to the nearest library, has made its transition to the digital world. This program takes it one step further and doesnt require you utilize the web to access a thesaurus. It puts the power of a pocket thesaurus right on your computer screen! From the pocket copy to your desktop, this thesaurus brings you everything that you could do with a pocket thesaurus, with the speed and ease of use of the modern day computer system.
Who is this app designed for:Anyone who frequently writes papers or reports or anything that requires you to find synonyms to replace commonly used words in said papers to avoid repetition. If you write any sort of paper, you will find a use for this program.
The GoodThis application is the first of its kind that this author has had the pleasure of reviewing. Right from the start, the interface is very easy to use and to learn, so even the novice computer user can understand it without too much trouble. The program offers a very useful DOUBLE CLICK option setting where you can have the program either; lookup synonyms of the highlighted word in the results list, or have it copy that word to clipboard for insertion elsewhere.
The program offers you various nicities that arent obvious to the naked eye. For one, on the "Find Related/Synonymous Roots" tab, you can click on other words that have a similar meaning to the word you are looking for a synonym too, and then the program will display synonyms for that word. Moby offers a very nice right click menu which provides you various options for the program such as: Expanding that sublisting to display the Roots or synonyms for the highlighted word, or displaying synonyms only for that word. So you can go pretty deep for synonyms of the various words you are working with.
One other great feature of Moby's thesaurus is its ability to substitute a wildcard type character, "@" and "%", for vowels and consonant's respectively. So, if I wanted to search for 3 letter (vowels only) words, I would type in @@@ and the program would search for results for me containing only vowels. You can also use ? to search for any alphanumeric character in that specific position (as opposed to a wildcard *, which would search for one OR MORE characters in or after that given position). See the below screenshot for an example
The needs improvement sectionOn that note, I have a few things I think could be added or changed in Moby's delightful thesaurus.
The first of these if the adding of a "Find online" right click option which allows you to search for more synonyms in similar online thesaurus's. The ability to add a list of different thesaurus's would be VERY helpful.
The next thing that could be added would be a way to limit the number of results returned to either; Results with only one word (no two or more word combos), words beginning with a specific letter, or limiting to a specific number of results to be returned (or a combo of these three). This would provide for greater flexibility in the results desired to be returned.
Thats all I could really find after testing it for 24 hours. A very well written app, so I am not surprised there isnt much room for improvement
ConclusionsAs you can see, this thesaurus program is very powerful and can be very helpful to the user writing a book report for school, a thesis paper for college, or a project proposal for a business meeting. Try it out, you wont regret it!
This gets Josh's 4 Sham rating. Great job Moby!
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