What's New in Spell Catcher X version 10.2.3

Spell Catcher X version 10.2.3 is built as a Universal application and component, and will run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macintosh computers.

Spell Catcher X 10.2.3 is primarily a maintenance and bug fix release, but does include a number of new features and enhancements. Spell Catcher X versions 10.2, 10.2.1 and 10.2.2 introduced a much larger number of new features. Choose Help > Complete Version History in the Spell Catcher application to see what was added in those versions. Choose Help > Spell Catcher Help for more information and details on using these and other Spell Catcher X features.

Note: Some language plug-ins have been updated with this release! Make sure to use the Spell Catcher > Get Updates and Languages command to get the latest version of any language plug-ins you use.

Spell Catcher X version 10.2.2 or later is required for use on Intel Macs.

Download Spell Catcher X 10.2.3 now and find out what's new later!

System Requirements

Spell Catcher X versions 10.2.2 and later require Mac OS X 10.3.9, or Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later.
Those using Mac OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar) through Mac OS X 10.3.8 must continue to use Spell Catcher X 10.2.1.

New Interactive Preferences

• Added to the Interactive pane, Completion tab: Use number key shortcuts (1-0). This exposes the hidden default from 10.2.2 to control the use of number keys for selecting completions.
• Added to the Interactive pane, Spelling tab, Showing suggestions, Pop-up suggestions list tab: Use number key shortcuts (1-0). This controls the use of number keys for selecting suggestions.
• Added to the Interactive pane, Automatic tab: Use Unicode punctuation if available. Instead of non-breaking spaces, more accurate white space Unicodes are used where appropriate. This includes characters such as EN SPACE (U+2002), THIN SPACE (U+2009) and the like. Only French and Canadian French languages have this capability at this time. Note: Make sure to use the Spell Catcher > Get Updates and Languages command to get the latest version(s) of any language plug-ins you use.

New Alert Preference

Added to the Alerts pane: Alert when no errors remain in Check Selection. This controls whether the System Alert sound is played when there are no (more) errors shown when using Check Selection.

Quick Shorthand Duplication

There is now a Duplicate command in the Edit menu, available when editing Shorthand Glossary documents. Useful for quickly making a new shorthand that's similar to an existing one. A sequence number is appended to the abbreviation, as they must be unique. If that doesn't suit your idea of the perfect abbreviation, simply edit it to your liking.

New - Actually Useful - Speak Button Behavior

The state of the Speak button in the Check Selection, Check Word, and Suggest Spelling windows is now remembered (by default). Additionally, error words are spoken when they are newly-checked (Check Word only), encountered (Check Selection only), or restored. There are new defaults to control whether the Speak button's state is remembered for each window, however there is no user interface for them at this time. You can use the defaults command in the Terminal (or edit the com.rainmaker.SpellCatcher.plist file) if you want to restore the previous "don't remember" behavior:

New Spotlight-Searchable Document Types

The Spotlight plug-in recognizes more kinds of Spell Catcher X documents, making the following Spotlight searches possible:

• Dictionary Server documents: Host name of the server (custom "Dictionary Server" attribute).
• Modify Selection Macros: Macro description (kMDItemDescription), Number of steps, Each step's functional description (custom "Macro Steps" attribute).
• Language Plug-ins: The language itself (kMDItemLanguages).
• Spellings: The language itself (kMDItemLanguages), Copyright information (kMDItemCopyright).
• Thesaurus: The language itself (kMDItemLanguages), Copyright information (kMDItemCopyright).
• Dictionary Definitions: The language itself (kMDItemLanguages), Copyright information (kMDItemCopyright).

The above will be displayed in the More Info pane in Spotlight search results, and in the Finder's Get Info window.

Sure, we realize that the above metadata is somewhat basic, feel free to send us your feedback with what other Spotlight-searchable information you'd find useful. And no, we don't think it would be very useful to index (say) all the words in a Spellings database.

Note that there are Terminal command scripts in the "Spotlight Commands" folder in the "Extras" folder on the installation disk (and in our FAQs) that you can use if you need to "kick start" Spotlight to re-index your Spell Catcher files using this new plug-in.

Other Improvements

• Enhanced: Improvements to editing Dictionary Server documents:
  • Sync Databases will preserve the In Look Up and Use? state of databases when the list of databases on the server changes.
  • The Server Info drawer no longer closes when the host name is changed.
  • New "Name" column shows the (short) database name. This is useful when multiple databases have the same description. Previously, this information was only available in the help tag for a database.
• Enhanced: No longer necessary to log out and in again after installing new language plug-ins, or after adding/removing/refreshing your license (if doing so changes the available languages) if Spell Catcher's input method was active. With Spell Catcher X 10.2.3, restarting the Spell Catcher application (quit, then re-open) is sufficient.
• Enhanced: Better compatibility with Java applications opened with Jar Launcher, or built with Jar Bundler. Still, there are serious problems with Java and all input methods - to have any success at all the Java JS2E 5.0 runtime must be used. JS2E 1.4.x simply crashes when text is input using any input method. As well, the compatibility change is a definite hack to try to work around the fact that Java will not suppress keystrokes when an input method tells the app to do so. This means that shorthand expansions and spelling corrections now work, but automatic changes such as smart quotes, prevent double spaces, and others that rely on keystrokes being suppressed still don't work right. Unfortunately, this enhancement doesn't help with Java applications that use their own text editing engines or include Java-related libraries. Problems such as this generally have to be solved at the application level, by the developers themselves.
• Enhanced: When you try to assign a reserved keyboard shortcut (Spell Catcher Preferences, Shortcuts pane), there is now an option to use that shortcut anyway. Previously, all reserved keyboard shortcuts were disallowed.
• Fixed: Display of keyboard shortcuts (Shortcuts Preferences, suggestions pop-up) when the current keyboard layout didn't contain any 'uchr' data.
• Fixed: Long-standing, intermittent (in general) "No text was found in the pasteboard" alerts when using Check Selection and other selection-based commands. This problem was quite persistent for a small number of users, but extremely difficult for us to reproduce. It appears to be caused by "undocumented special cases and undesirable side effects" with the APIs used to post synthesized events.
• Fixed: In certain applications, when more than 8 words and 63 characters of text was selected, it was possible for the New Shorthand for Selection command in the input menu to be "too long." The result was often a strangely-positioned input menu.
• Fixed: Crash that could occur when checking or making suggestions for very long "words" - longer than 180 characters or so.
• Fixed: Look Up results from Dictionary Servers not properly updated when the "Use?" state was changed for a virtual database.
• Fixed: Automatic case adjustment (based on the abbreviation's case) of shorthand glossary expansions longer than 63 characters.
• Fixed: Work around one of the problems caused by the bug in WebView (Mail on Tiger uses editable WebView in its message composition windows) where input methods are not properly notified about mouse clicks. Spell Catcher needs to receive mouse events as a signal that the selection has (likely) changed, and that interactive checking needs to be reset. The result was that after selecting text with the mouse when Spell Catcher was tracking an error, the various context-dependent commands (Suggest Spelling, Check Word, Look Up, etc.) would reflect the error or most-recently-typed word, instead of the selected text. Note that this work around is only effective if you actually select some text - not if you simply click to position the insertion point.
• Fixed: Quite a bit of Spell Catcher's AppleScript support broke during development of version 10.2. The scripting needed an overhaul to update it for important changes and improvements in Cocoa scripting on Tiger. While there's still more work that can (and should) be done, the available scripting support at least works (once again). Spell Catcher X now uses modern scripting definition (sdef) files (these are only used on Mac OS X 10.4.x), along with traditional scriptSuite files for use on Mac OS X 10.3. The various script classes and commands have been re-designed where necessary. Be aware that any existing AppleScripts you may have for use with Spell Catcher X will at the very least need re-compiling, and in all likelihood need some tweaking or re-working for use with Spell Catcher X 10.2.3.
• Fixed: Some of the more obvious problems with the input method on the WWDC 2006 Mac OS X Leopard Developer Preview. A couple of (relatively minor) optimizations used by the input method were causing the Text Services Manager to crash on the Leopard Preview.
• Fixes from the Spell Catcher X 10.2.2 Input Method Tuner (Build 5) have been rolled in:
  • Work around a bug in Adobe GoLive that caused the Check Selection and other selection-related commands in the input menu to be disabled or otherwise not fully-functional.
  • Work around a bug in Netscape that causes the selected text to be deleted whenever an input method asks the application for it. All mozilla.org apps except Camino have this very nasty, destructive bug.
  • Work around a bug in AppleWorks 6 that caused the Check Selection and other selection-related commands in the input menu to be disabled or otherwise not fully-functional.
  • Work around a bug in Eudora 6.x that caused the Check Selection and other selection-related commands in the input menu to be disabled or otherwise not fully-functional when running on Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther).
  • Better compatibility with the input method and PandoCalendar.
• Updated: The following default reference documents: U.S. English Computer Terms, British English Computer Terms, Canadian English Computer Terms, British English Additional Words. Note: These updated references may not automatically get copied into your Application Support/Spell Catcher/Additional References folder. You can force the (re) installation of all the default references by holding down the option key while launching the Spell Catcher application. Only locked references will be updated - if you unlocked a default reference to edit its contents, it will not be overwritten and your changes will remain intact.
• Updated: The built-in list of Dictionary Servers (shown in the menu in the Host: field).
• Updated: The Online Help Book has been updated (as always!) to reflect changes in this version. As well, the (complete) contents of the "What Was New in 10.2?" and "What Was New in 10.2.1?" RTF documents (previously available from Spell Catcher's Help menu) have been incorporated into the Version History chapter, and the documents themselves have been removed from the application. This reduced the overall size of the application package by about 1.5Mb, without any loss of content. Along with this change, the corresponding commands in the Help menu have been removed.
• Changed: Changes to the way the NSServices entry in the Info.plist for the Spell Catcher Services.service application is created. These changes eliminate the possibility that the "base" copy of the Spell Catcher Services.service app (inside Spell Catcher's application package) will be found and registered as a service provider, by either the Mac OS or a services modification utility (like Service Scrubber or the Services Preference Pane).
• Changed: Whenever Spell Catcher is running in Unlicensed mode, it tries its best to stop being the preferred spelling service for languages set to use Spell Catcher in the Spelling Panel. This is done in order to minimize the chances that Spell Catcher open automatically by the Mac OS, on behalf of an application that uses the system-wide spelling service. The experience when this happened was potentially annoying, due to the "Spell Catcher X Unlicensed" reminder window appearing when an unlicensed copy of the application is launched. The impression was that Spell Catcher wouldn't stay Quit in this specific situation. This was not an issue with licensed copies. Note that there is no way to "convince" a currently-open application that's using the Spelling Panel to use some other spelling service. Open applications must be restarted for the change to another spelling service to take effect.
• Changed: Only bounce the Dock icon once when Spell Catcher shows the "Trial" or "Unlicensed" reminder window when it's not the active application.
• Changed: Numerous minor code clean-ups, mostly in the input method, many related to the TSM testing tools.
• Built with the Xcode 2.4.1.

Spell Catcher X Version History