Google Toolbar Spellcheck, A Blogging Tool?
Google Toolbar 3 Beta has been taking a lot of heat for their auto link feature, which by the way you can disable (but we aren’t going there). I however have not heard a lot about the new spell checking feature. I have seen a lot of plugins available for wordpress, .Text, etc.. for spell checking your entries. Most of the time these things involves some setup. I have not used any of these so I really cannot speak to exactly how long that might take. I have however found that with Beta3 of Google’s Toolbar, I am able to spellcheck my posts.
When my cursor is positioned in my Post box I can click on the “Check†button and the toolbar will take control of my text box and it will find and allow me to correct any spelling errors that I may have made. Anyone who uses a web based publishing tool should give this a shot, it is very simple and cool. Since it is web browser based you will of course have to use IE 5.0 or higher.
Now that I think about it this would also be a great tool to use when commenting on other people’s blogs. I have yet to see spell check in that situation?
From a techie point of view a couple of things are notable. It seems that what the toolbar does is turn the existing text box into standard text. This is evident when you right click on a misspelled word and choose edit. It gives you a text box to type in which I am pretty sure isn’t possible. A text box within a text box that is. It could however just be DHTML placement? I am unsure and not really interested in picking it apart since it works so well
But be sure to drop me a comment and let me know if you find more out about how it works!
Update: You don’t actually have to have your cursor in the text box. When you press check it checks all of the text box’s on the page.
Are there any keybord shortcuts than can turn this on?
[...] from translating a page, Google Toolbar has a lot of features like the Autofill, and the SpellCheck. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
[...] Aside from translating a page, Google Toolbar has a lot of features like the Autofill, and the SpellCheck. [...]