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?