SpellCatcher Plus. Best in Breed

[cnewtonne]

Basic Info

Name of app reviewed	SpellCatcher Plus
App URL	http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherplus/
App Version Reviewed	3 (latest)
Test System Specs	WinXp Pro
Supported OSes	Mac and most of Windows including Vista
Support Methods	forum and email (i.e., forum, email, phone, etc)
Upgrade Policy	Policy for upgrades. If pay per upgrade, put price here for upgrades
Trial Version Available?	14 day trial.
Pricing Scheme	lite and plus version for $30 and $40, see here http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherplus/difference.html
Screencast Video URL	http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherplus/tour/
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	REVIEWER: Just a user.

Intro:

Best I've seen in this category. It delivers on these features GLOBALLY in any application you work with:

- Check your spelling as you type
- Quickly access a  Dictionary and Thesaurus  so you can find just the right word when you need it...
- Helps you to type much faster by expanding shortcuts you've created into phrases.
- Performs checking on text selections that you've already typed.
- Processes text selections including counting the number of words, sentences, capitalizing sentences, removing multiple spaces, search and replace text strings, get statistics, convert case and more.
- spell Catcher is also a multi-lingual tool. It can check your words if you're working in nine different languages.
- Spell Catcher waits in the back ground until you want it, not taking up valuable screen space

See here for more details http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherplus/

SCREENSHOT OF APP INTERFACE HERE
http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherplus/tour/

Who is this app designed for:

Anyone who uses a keyboard.


The Good


- It does what it says it can and does it very well.
- Used it for > 2 years. Stable and performing. Do not remember it crashing on me once.
- GLOBAL is global. It always worked in all applications I've used. Never had issues. You can selectively disable it on a any application you like too.
- Feature full. The option panel has at least over 100 different options.
- Developer is responsive via forums.


The needs improvement section


- development has been slow. No major updates over a year now except for a interim one for IE7 and vista compatibility.
- Some features can benefit from some improvements like the application executions lists.
- text expansion does not support RTF


Why I think you should use this product

- Offers 5 major text manipulation features, all in one package. Will never find these features in one app.
- Check spelling in any application as you type it and if already typed too.
- Run format scripts on any text e.g. remove line breaks, capitalize first letter, do a character count and much more.
- shorthand expansion is nicest I've seen. show a little popup for you to see before accepting it.


How does it compare to similar apps
- this Comparison applies on the ones I listed below.

- None has this many features.
- None offers stability and performance I've seen in this one.

This is what I tested with  ...

http://www.isota.com/product/4_3.asp
http://www.tech-pro.net/as-u-type.html
http://www.wamasoft.com/index.htm?app
http://www.humanized.com/products/enso/words/
http://www.flashpeak.com/
http://www.spellcheckanywhere.com/default.asp
http://www.spellex.com/support/custsvce_sa.htm#How%20does%20Spellex%20Anywhere%20work?
http://www.smartlinkcorp.com/new/spellink-2002-english-IN99101-info.html?cat=Proofing%20Tools&plat=Windows%20NT/2000/XP&lang=English
http://www.alcodasoftware.com/spell-magic.htm
http://zwliang.bizhat.com/p_screen_shot.htm
http://www.whitesmoke.com/landing_flash/grammer.html
http://www.crossword-compiler.com/

Conclusions

Best in breed software

[mouser]

may i request you always attach at least 1 screenshot, hopefully more?
makes it easier to blog.

[cnewtonne]

acknowledged.

[Ruffnekk]

Nice review, but please remove the various default template texts from the header 

[mouser]

and add the screenshot plz!

[elpresi]

Thanks for the review, I tried it and it works great :-)

[Lutz_]

Thanks a lot for the review. I will surely give this a try.

[Darwin]

Hmm... thought I'd responded here long ago, but hadn't! I purchased SpellCatcher Plus after reading this review and this thread:

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=5918.0

And have overall enjoyed it. It's highly configurable, so you can turn off a lot of features that (might) annoy you. My only beef with it is that every so often when I reboot I get a message saying that my SpellCatcher settings were created by an earlier version and could not be loaded, so I have to reset everything (fortunately, this is very easy to do). This leads to the second annoyance (minor): there have been no updates since I started using it in July or August 2007. I have corresponded with support and the replies were courteous, helpful, and prompt.

[Darwin]

Note: THIS is the post that pointed me to SpellCatcher Plus: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=5957.msg43681#msg43681

Note as well, that despite my last post in the thread that I linked to above, I am still a registered user of SpellCatcher Plus! I never did request a refund because it is much better suited to my needs than the other options that I was looking at...

EDIT: see my sig