DDH Thesaurus

There’s nothing worse than sending off an important file and then realizing you’ve spelled something wrong. It’s amateurish. Depending on who receives it, you may have to deal with someone who: a) doesn’t notice or ignores it (you hope) or b) just gives you a hard time about it, or c) decides not to do business with you because they think you lack attention to detail.

If you use a program like Documents to Go there’s already a spelling checker built-in, but it only works for that application. If you add a special word to your custom dictionary, it’s only added there.

If you need something more, a good bet is Thesaurus/SpellCheck for Palm OS by DDH Software which retails for $15. It has a nice clean interface, as you can see from the screenshots.

About the only thing that surprised me is that the program is several years old. Then as I thought about it, I wondered: “After you’ve written a good spelling checker/thesaurus app, what do you do to improve it?”

I don’t really know.

As far as I know, there is no real API for exchanging text between apps in Palm OS. So it’s not particularly easy to exchange information from one app to the next. The easiest way is to use the copy/paste functions built into Palm OS.

That’s what DDH opted to do.

There is an option for automatically looking up the word on the clipboard when the program is launched:

Of course you have to be able to trigger this fairly quickly (I assigned the side button on my Treo 650 to Thesaurus and another to DocsToGo). You can also use their DDH Memo and DDH Mail which are compatible with the program. I didn‘t test those so I can’t speak to how well they work, but it’s cool that they offer them.

The database of words is a little out of date (it had no suggested spellings for “Goooogle”) in the standard database. You have several options. You can check the free Large Database and see if that suits you better, or if you want to save space, checkout the smaller database which contains only the 2002 most common English words. Still not finding what you need? Checkout the Word List Creation Utility to make your own list.

Checkout the DDH Software website for the Library as well as more information and screenshots. You can also download the demo there.

While not everyone may need a separate spelling checking and thesaurus, this is a good option for those who do.

Until next time