Hello my friends. It's time for another adventure with yours truly. Well, it's more of a comedy rather than an adventure but either way I feel you will agree and will appreciate everything today.
Thank God for spell check! Some (meaning me) would consider spell check to be one of the best inventions since this whole "Technology Age" has come about. No more dictionaries to check spelling, SHIFT-F7(in Microsoft Word) to find similar words using a thesaurus, and basic1 grammar checks to make sure you look like you know what you're doing. Hooray for all these applications that most of us consider a part of spell check! (Even though they are separate apps.)
If you haven't noticed, I truly love spell check. I believe that without spell check we would have a lot of teh's and even more eh's. And if you are not quite sure what those are, they are what happen to the word "the" when you type really fast. But you've never noticed them since spell check picks them up and automatically fixes them! Isn't that just awesome! (Too bad it doesn’t fix double spaces. Oh yeah, by the way, double spaces between punctuation and beginning of the next sentence is incorrect grammar and isn't good typing skills anymore and if you are typing on the web it gets really nasty. Just something to keep an eye out for when typing on the web.)
Now, it's time to let you in on a little secret. Microsoft Word isn't the only thing that has spell check on it. SHHHHH! Don't let it out. I might get sued or something. I'm not quite sure what their case would be, but with this sue-happy world we live in, who knows. It's time to show you the world of spell check on the internet. My favorite browser isn't Internet Explorer but rather Firefox. I prefer Firefox because you can do almost anything with it. Just go to Firefox's add-ons page and peruse all the different apps and ad-ons you can add to your Firefox browser. Now, please don’t overload your browser with every little app you can find. That just gets cumbersome and a little annoying. But, if that’s what helps you get your kicks, by all means, add all the apps you want.
Another good option for spell check and other really cool apps would be iGoogle. iGoogle, much like Firefox, has an app section. The only differences are that iGoogle is available on every main2 browser and you have to have a Google login to access iGoogle. Which means if you are an Internet Explorer guru and love everything Microsoft does, you can still have a place to go in your browser to help you with spelling and just about everything else. You just have to remember one more login and password.
Now it’s time for cold hard facts about spell checks and added apps to browsers. First, if you choose the added apps to browsers note that there are many “user created”3 apps that may or may not do exactly what you want. Always read descriptions and reviews before downloading anything. (This is just a general good rule of thumb.) This also goes for iGoogle apps, but on iGoogle you are not downloading apps to your computer itself. You are, more or less, customizing you very own Google page much like My Yahoo4.
Either way your needs will be well met with whichever choice you make - weather it be downloading apps to Firefox, iGoogle, or just writing everything in Word before you post it on a blog or in a comment box. As long as you learn the basic abilities and hot keys5 for what you are using you will be a very happy user of some of the best technology around.
1 BASIC - Microsoft nor any spell/grammar check will catch everything. Always get someone to read over what you wrote.
2 MAIN BROWSERS – Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari
3 “USER CREATED” – Apps created by TECHNICAL users who wanted an app to do something different or wanted to try to perfect the app
4 MY YAHOO – A good customized homepage but lacks a lot of added applications that iGoogle has (personal opinion)
5 HOT KEYS – Shortcuts using specific key combinations on your keyboard to perform specific tasks within a program
Comments
Post has no comments.