OS X + Grammer Check
I found this note about developer improvements on OS X quite interesting:
"Text engine improvements include a systemwide grammar checking
facility, smart quote support, automatic link detection and support for
copying and pasting multiple selections." [1]
It's about time that Microsoft gave us built in spellcheckers and grammer checkers. I mean, spell check is something required (or useful for) just about any application, and it's about time we saw some system APIs for this. It's hard to believe Microsoft thinks developers need fully fledged APIs for text-to-speech, speech-to-text, handwriting recognition, natural language processing, etc. but more than they need something as universally useful as spellchecking or grammar checking APIs. I never thought I'd be saying the Apple get developers better than Microsoft... but with this and support for Ruby on Rails / Subversion / Python, etc. in the OS, they are doing some good things.
Update: Pulled up some info on the Natural Language Processing functionality in WinF/X from early Longhorn betas and looks like they were supposed to give you the ability to do this type of thing as well. But... looking at the Vista docs on MSDN, the namespace is missing! Did it get pulled?
[1]
http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showtopic=5142&st=0&#entry58868