Ajax Spellchecking
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Another nifty feature of HelpSpot 1.1 is the integrated ajax spellchecker. It's pretty cool stuff. Personally, I use the one Safari has built in or Spellbound in Firefox, but not everyone has that option. Without further ado, exciting ajax spellchecking video!
Discussion
Awesome. Thats one of the things that was asked for when I was doing my massive helpdesk search and review. Another gold star for HelpSpot!
Created by Nola on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
Oh and yeah a little "Working" animated graphic would be cool but you need the text there, imho. Especially to notify you that there are no mispellings. You could just hit a SetTimeout statement to hide the text after 3 seconds or so.
Looking very cool there Ian.
Created by Collin on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
I made a suggestion to Mike Davidson's Newsvine.com beta after they updated their site and it makes sense here as well. When you click to check spelling there isn't enough visually to ensure that the user knows it's in edit mode. It would make sense to change the background color to a very light, subtle gray color (or maybe a very slight tiny of yellow) so that you get that instant visual training and you don't start trying to type over the spell checker.
Created by Collin on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
That's probably true Ian. I think your small change may make all the difference. This stuff isn't a science anyway.
Created by Matt Breckon on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
Looking way cool!
Will this work with TinyMCE in Knowledge books? Because I normally use the Google toolbar to check textfields+textareas, but it won't work with TinyMCE...
Created by Dimitris Giannitsaros on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
Yeah, I am switching that "check spelling" so something a little different since it's the same right now. Spinning thing probably will have to wait for a future release though.
One thing that could be throwing you off a bit is that I only wrote a few words. In most cases the entire text box will be full, at least across once, so it won't feel like it's so far away. I think it feels that way here because there's only whitespace beneath there in my video.
Created by Ian on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
I agree that feedback is needed but I think the issue is that it is too far away from where the action is happening.
Also "Check spelling" is the same wording as the link you've just clicked on. How about turning the "Check spelling" link into a "Checking Spelling ..." link with an animated "..." ? Then use a spinning thingymajiggy when getting an individual words spelling?
Just a few thoughts.
Created by Matt Breckon on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
I wasn't sure about that either, but there's definitely some feedback needed as some words take longer to lookup than others. Would a standard "spinning ajax thingy" work better you think?
Created by Ian on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
That looks really really neat. However, I'm not sure about the red "Check spelling" and other messages that appear on the right hand side - they divert my eyes away from where the list ultimately appears. I noticed that your mouse pointer moves towards it - was that you indicating the message or were you distracted by it too?
Created by Matt Breckon on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
Excellent. Yeah it's definitely been a big request. There's a few ways to go with it. I almost went with a centrally hosted spellcheker which UserScape would host, that would make setup really easy, well nothing actually. However, I continue to fear hosting anything, so instead I went with an aspell based solution. A little more of a pain for the customer, but not too bad. It should also be a bit faster since it's local.
Created by Ian on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm
-Dimitris, this doesn't work in the knowledge books yet simply because I didn't have time to try and make it work before the release. That's on my list of things to get working for next release, though I'm not sure how nice TinyMCE will play with it, I'm guessing not very nice so I may have to do things slightly different then in the request area.
-Collin, good idea! I actually had that on my list a long time ago then forgot it. I'm going to try and sneak it in!
-----
Created by Ian on 01.26.2006 8:01 pm