[Windows Only] How often do you type the word “teh” instead of “the”? If it’s very often, you aren’t alone. “Teh” is so common that it’s become an accepted word on the internet.

Would you like to have most of your misspellings corrected automatically? You can have that, and much more, with a small portable freeware utility named ‘Texter’.

Texter is a text replacement tool from Adam Pash at Lifehacker. It includes a small library of common spelling errors, and it will constantly watch every word you type. When it recognizes a misspelled word, it can automatically change the letters to correct the error. However, the real power it gives you is the ability to create your own letter combinations and replacements. For example, I can set up Texter to automatically replace “imo” with “In my opinion”.

Watch this video if you’d like to see Texter in action:

( link to video )

I use Texter for:
• phrases that I type often
• abbreviations that I like to expand
• addresses I type often
• passwords at websites
• long signatures at the end of letters
• famous quotes at the end of letters
• programming code snippets

Download from Texter Home Page:

If you liked this post, you should take a look at some free copy and paste enhancements and a clipboard manager named Ditto.

Techie Buzz Verdict:
If you aren’t using a text replacement tool already, Texter is good place to start. It’s free, it’s portable and it’s easy to use. Like me, you may find that it’s a ‘must-have’ on your PC and on your portable flash drive. The only thing it’s missing is a local help file describing all of the features.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4.5/5 (almost perfect)

If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and you do any writing on the web then, here is an interesting and intelligent add-on for you.  After the Deadline, from Automattic,  is a fabulous add-on for Mozilla Firefox which brings smart, contextual spelling, style and grammar checking to the browser. It works on most text area’s used in HTML forms.

After the Deadline enables you to write better, tweet with correct grammar and spend less time editing. It can handle everything from common typos to misused punctuation, double negatives, redundancies and other grammatical errors.

Once you install this add-on, just click on the check icon displayed on text areas of web forms to check your grammar and spelling or right-click and select ‘Check Spelling and Grammar’ from the context menu of a text area.

You can set After the Deadline to run the proofreader automatically before submitting a form. Apart from the default grammar rules applied, some extra options like bias language, cliche, complex phrases, double negative etc., can be used to find patterns of poor writing style. You may add phrase(s) to the ignore list by typing it into the text field and clicking ‘Add’. Following is a screencast demonstrating some of the useful features of After the Deadline.

After the Deadline is also available as a plugin for WordPress, RoundCube, bbPress and PHPList.

Download After the Deadline for Firefox

You might also want to check out how After the Deadline tries to make spelling suggestions.

Natural Languages are complex. Depending upon the context, a single word can have multiple meanings. Although spell checkers can easily spot misspelled words, most of them can’t distinguish ‘knew’ from ‘new’.

After the Deadline is a Spell Checker with a difference. It is designed to improve your writing by utilising artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology. Some of the features which sets it apart from other spell checkers are:

• Detection of Misused Words: AtD claims that their database includes more than 1,500 commonly misused words and they can automatically detect and correct common contextual errors.
• Checks Style: AtD attempts to improve your writing by automatically identifying usage of passive voice, clichés, redundant phrases, unnecessarily complex words etc.
• Checks Grammar: AtD also includes a sophisticated grammar checker for spotting common grammatical mistakes like determiner agreement errors and agreement of the verb with the subject errors.

So does it work? We tested After the Deadline for a couple of days. We found the Context Checker to be a bit of a hit and miss. It was able to distinguish ‘knew’ from ‘new’ but failed to spot incorrect usage of ‘now’ (instead of ‘know’) and ‘hour’ (instead of ‘our’). The grammar checker worked better and was quickly able to spot incorrect usage of ‘its’ (instead of it’s) as well agreement of verb with the subject errors. Not only does AtD identify potential errors in your writing, it also offers detailed explanation so that you can learn from your mistakes.

After the Deadline is available as a plugin for WordPress (Visual Editor only), RoundCube, TinyMCE and PHPList. The plugin is free for personal use. If you want to get can idea about their service before installing the plugin you may do so at polishmywriting.com.

We had told you about Google Chrome 3 which added couple of new features including auto spell check corrections for common typos users make, this feature can be immensely useful for people who write a lot.

People usually spend around 2-10% of the time to correct spelling mistakes and typos on an average, the time thus spent could in the end account for a huge amount of time waste.

The one feature we love in the Microsoft Office family is the ability to auto correct typos for common words without having the user having to do it manually, this is a really good feature when you write a lot of mails or documents.

However this feature was lacking when you edited documents, wrote comments or did other things on the Internet, however thanks to the folks behind Google Chrome users can now have the same features while they write using their browser.

Like we had said in the earlier post, we really do think that this feature will help Google Docs and Gmail users immensely when it comes to users who use Google Chrome, the reason is that both these services do not have a auto spell check corrector, however with the help of this new feature in Chrome, both these services will get a immensely useful feature while editing documents or writing emails, just like they had with Microsoft Word or Microsoft Outlook.

That said, auto spell check corrector is not limited to just these two services and can be used anywhere.

It would be great to have auto-spell check maintain a user database like office products, allowing users to specify custom words they want to auto-correct, this would definitely be great as you could use that feature to automatically expand text, the usage could definitely be more than that, but it would be great nevertheless.

What do you think about this feature, would it do you any good? Do you think that we have missed something here? Do let us know your thoughts about them.

Just a few days back Google released a faster version of Google Chrome, however those who are using development and beta versions of Chrome have already been moved to version 3.0.182.2.

This version adds a couple of exciting features, first of all it adds support for using the video tag as proposed in HTML5.

Another exciting addition is the addition of Auto Spelling Corrections where typos like tehwill automatically be converted to thein the blink of an eye, this feature is really handy for people who type fast and have to go back and correct typos made for common words.

Take a look at the image below to see the auto check in action.

Incidentally this feature adds a auto Spell checker to Google Docs when you edit documents using Chrome, another feature that is part of Microsoft Office.

Auto-check is not enabled by default for text fields, however you can change that by right-clicking on the text box and select Check spelling for this field from the Spell Check options. Thanks @aalaap.

To enable this feature you will have to use the –auto-spell-correct flag while starting Chrome.

In addition to this there are several other UI clean-ups and other fixes, you can read the entire release post at Chrome Release Blog.