Cool Mac Gear

The revivication of Newer Technology has resulted in restoration of Newer’s free software downloads site, which includes both useful utilities and hardware drivers -- thinks like GURU and Gauge PRO, and my personal fave -- SpellTools.

SpellTools, which I have been using daily for several years as an auxiliary to Tex Edit Plus, BBEdit Lite, and other text editing or email programs that don’t have a built-in spellchecker, gives you a suite of text tools like prooflistening, rubber stamps, and text cleanup and editing tools in addition to a powerful spellchecker engine which I like about as well as any I’ve used. A small floating palette appears when the program is active, and contains all the Text Tools.

SpellTools Features:

• Spelling
In the following example, if this were the actual SpellTools application, highlighting the following text and clicking the first button of the SpellTools palette would spell check the text:

• Text-to-Speech
In the following example, if this were the actual SpellTools application, highlighting the following text and clicking the second button of the SpellTools palette would speak the text:

• Stamper
The Stamp Tool allows you to set up rubber stamps of text that can be inserted into any document by clicking on the stamp tool pop-up and selecting the appropriate stamp from the menu. User defined stamps and standard date and time stamps are available from the menu.

• Cleanup Incoming E-mail
Some E-mail servers add hard carriage returns causing paragraphs not to wrap as you would like (see example below). SpellTools allows you to “Normalize Returns of Text Selection” from the text tools pop-up:

• Strip Extra Spaces
Sooner or later you get tired of trying to “normalize” spaces. SpellTools will strip superfluous spaces for you when you highlight text and choose “Normalize Spaces of Text Selection” or “Strip Leading Spaces of Text Selection” from the text tools pop-up.

• Garbage Removal
Sooner or later you get tired of backspacing and forward spacing “>” characters. SpellTools can clean up text such as the following by highlighting it and choosing “Strip “>”from Text Tools Selection” from the text tools pop-up:

• Find & Replace
SpellTools has a standard find and replace routine that works in any application. When running SpellTools, simply choose “Find & Replace the Text Selection” from the text tools pop-up. The find and replace tool is case-sensitive.

• Word Counting
When running SpellTools, you can count the number of words, lines and characters of a text selection by choosing “Word Count of Text Selection” from the text tools pop-up.

• Case Changing
SpellTools allows you to change the case characteristics of text by highlighting it and choosing “UPPERCASE the Text Selection”, “lowercase the Text Selection”, or “Capitalize the Text Selection” from the text tools pop-up. This feature is aware of diacritical things like “möbius”, or contractions like “they’re”.

SpellTools works with most Mac applications because it is an application, not an extension or control panel. Therefore, it will not conflict with other things in your System Folder. It is encoded FAT binary, so it works on older 68K Macs, as well as taking full advantage of the speed capabilities of Power PC processors.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit complicated. While the version of SpellTools downloadable from the Newer Website will work with Mac OS versions up to OS 8.6, if you have OS 9.x, getting SpellTools will be a two step process. After you download the SpellTools 1.3.3 application from Newer, you then you must go to Craig Marciniak’s SpellTools Webpage and download the version 1.4 updater. If you are running Mac OS 7.5 through 8.6, you only need version 1.3.3.

Note that the link to Craig’s version 1.4 updater on Newer’s site doesn’t work (at least it didn’t for me. The correct link is:
http://www.marciniak.com/spelltools/spelltools.html

And while SpellTools 1.3.3 from Newer is freeware, Craig says: “I am releasing this version [1.4] on the honor system with the hope you will pay for the forthcoming update. Of course, I certainly wouldn’t mind if you wanted to send me $10.00 via snail-mail now.”

There is no word on an OS X native version of SpellTools yet, and with the built-in Cocoa Services spellchecker in OS X, I suppose that there isn’t a lot of incentive to develop a X-friendly version of SpellTools. Pity -- this is a great little tool, and well worth the modest hassle of getting it set up in OS 9.x. I’ve found that it works fine up to OS 9.2.2.

SpellTools features summary:
• It is an application, not a slow and/or conflicting system extension
• Accelerated for Power Macs
• Provides a more sophisticated set of spelling algorithms
• “Prooflistening” (text-to-speech) reads your text aloud
• “Rubber Text Stamps” (text macros) for virtually all applications
• “Line Normalization” fixes bad line wraps
• “Caret Stripping” (removes “>”)
• “Find & Replace”
• “Word Counting”
• “Case Changing” converts selected text to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, etc.

System requirements (v.1,3,3):
• MacOS version 7.5 to 8.6 required
• 8MB of RAM or more
• Hard disk with at least 1 MB of available space

Other free utility downloads on the Newer site include:

Gauge PRO - a highly accurate speed measuring utility for the Mac. It reports the speed of your processor and cache as well as testing RAM.

GURU - the Guide to RAM Upgrades, will tell you about most Mac models and display all memory upgrade options.

For more information, visit:
http://www.newertech.com/software/

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear