I am a longtime admirer of the programs & work product of Cassady & Greene. (C&G) Most of you will recall some of their wonderful programs. Conflict Catcher, SoundJam, the first MP3 encoder for the Mac and my favorite Spell Catcher which will soon be available for OS X. I found myself to be quite disturbed in learning of Casady & Greene’s plight as noted David Pogue’s recent Circuits column in the New York Times wherein he writes that C&G is in trouble. The company has gone for 25 employees down to 8 and even the company’s president has been relegated to occasionally answering tech-support calls. <br><br>Spell Catcher for OS X is a mission critical application that I have been anxiously awaiting and I know from C&G’s message boards the author of Spell Catcher, Mr. Evan Gross, is laboring furiously in rewriting this wonderful application from the ground up. Sure there is lots of other spell checkers out there, but nothing like this one. With each error, I get TRUE INTERACTIVE spell checking in ANY application on message boards or wherever I write. By that I mean, with each error, I get a vocal prompt of “Curious” and automatically a drop down menu appears with a set of words it thinks I am trying to spell. 99 out of 100 times, the first word in the list is correct and I merely have to click on the corrected word to have automatically placed back into whatever I am typing into. No red marks all over my page like in word and no clicking on tools for corrections. Naturally, batch checking is supported if you prefer. This doesn’t even speak to the wonderful full-featured thesaurus and it’s included medical, legal and scientific dictionaries built right in. It even learns your most commonly misspelled words and automatically corrects them as you type. <br><br>Given C&G’s predicament. I immediately called and ordered both a copy “iData” and Spell Catcher for Windows. David Pogue wrote of how immensely important iData has been for him…<br><br>-------------------------------<br><br>Data Pro is to David Pogue what Spell Catcher 8 is to Bob Levitus: a must have app! <br><br>"Computers are great, but where are we supposed to stash all of our names and numbers, serial numbers, passwords, brainstorms, driving directions, and notes? Trying to stuff them into a typical field-based database was an exercise in insanity. What the world needs is a program like iData, which lets me keep every scrap of information in one central place, only one keystroke away -- and even sync it to the Palm. Now I can move into Mac OS X for good!" <br><br>David Pogue, best selling author and columnist<br><br><br><br>In need of an affordable database without the bells and whistles of a high-end database like FileMaker™?<br>iData Pro uses simplicity and speed to help you organize<br>* addresses<br>* phone numbers<br>* email addresses and messages<br>* web addresses<br>* classroom notes<br>* passwords <br>* serial numbers<br> <br>* christmas labels<br>* club membership lists<br>* recipes<br>* notes on garden plantings, etc.<br>* PTA and little league call lists<br>* personnel files and employee lists<br>* instructions, directions and more!<br><br>iData Pro can even archive all your email into one easy-to-use database. Archiving email into iData Pro will keep your email client from becoming bloated. Simply import the email you wish to archive from your Outlook Express™, Netscape™ or Eudora™ email client, select an freeform or field-based file, and voila! your email is now archived in an iData Pro database file so you can quickly sort through hundreds of emails in seconds. <br><br>-----------------------------------<br><br><br>I’m not even sure I need either since neither my fiancé nor myself use Windows much. It took two years of some gentle prodding but my fiancé has finally seen the light, and now has her own Ti and has all but abandoned windows in the last year. As for iData, being somewhat disorganized here, I’m sure it will prove rather more useful then I can imagine having never used it or it’s predecessors. <br><br>I hope all of you C&G fans and other interested parties will take a another look at C&G’s website http://www.casadyg.com/ and see if there isn’t something you need new to try or in the way of an upgrade to your existing software. Lets give this fine company the support it so richly deserves. <br><br><br><br>-------------------------------------------<br>RWoelk <br>Generating 2048 bits of randomness...<br><br>Only the educated are free! -Epictetus

It's a shame that a long-time great Mac app maker is having problems, but much like others that have gone down hill, it's for a reason. Apple bought SoundJam and renamed it iTunes - thereby killing C&G's #1 app. Then, Conflict Catcher was made obsolete by the release of OSX. All their other apps are simply minor enhancements that have many apps to compete with, not the least of which is built-in apps in OSX.<br><br>I have never used the Spell Checker they make, but it sounds pretty good. The problem is, nobody needs a spell checker in most web apps, most design apps have one built-in, and most "office" apps have one built-in as well. There just aren't enough people out there who are going to pay for something extra that they already get for free, or don't need - no matter how good it is.<br><br><br>[color:red]semicolon dash parenthesis</font color=red>

The good news is that Spell Catcher for OS X has finally gone beta and a final release is due in about a month according to the message boards over at C&G. <br><br>While some very good points have been made in your reply MacGizmo, I don't think most folks get it when it comes to Spell Catcher. Sure, there is an abundance of free spell checkers out there, often built into the applications themselves. Even OS X has a built in Spell Checker, but it only works in text edit as far as I can tell, and ALL of them are of LITTLE UTILITY if they don’t automatically correct as you type. Moreover, this causes you to have to copy and paste, or mire trough a kludge of mouse and or key stokes which takes a heavy toll on your typing speed. For example, what good are any of them typing in these message boards from I.E?<br><br>For those of you who are sloppy-fingered typist like myself, or can’t spell and are still using OS 9 or below, I encourage you to download the free trial of Spell Catcher 8.x.x.. The OS X version, when released, will have most of the feature set sans the ghost writer and it will offer some nice new features as well. Evan Gross has yet to disclose what they are just yet. <br><br><br>-------------------------------------------<br>RWoelk <br>Generating 2048 bits of randomness...<br><br>Only the educated are free! -Epictetus

I agree that this one seems/sounds to be particularly useful and quite good. My point was, that in many if not most cases, people either don't care about spelling, or are using MS Word which auto-checks the spelling as you type and works pretty well. There just aren't enough people out there that require a spell checker, and see the value of C&G's app.<br><br><br>[color:red]semicolon dash parenthesis</font color=red>