Spelling Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily iPhone App: Letter Rush puts a new spin on spelling games

by Mike Schramm (Apr 2nd, 2013)

Word games are probably my least favorite genre on the App Store at this point -- I think they're overused, and many companies these days are just kicking out half-baked spelling games in the hopes of reaching a large casual audience. But Letter Rush, put together by a former Zynga studio, is ...

DevJuice: Spellchecking short strings

by Erica Sadun (Mar 4th, 2013)

A few years ago, xkcd created a crowd-sourced color survey to collected real-world hue descriptions. You'll find the hilarious results here. I've been working on updating my UIColor utilities as part of building a color-sampling app. Stumbling across this survey, I decided to add the xkcd ...

Daily iPhone App: Quento is a spelling game, but with math

by Mike Schramm (Feb 12th, 2013)

Quento was recommended to me just recently by someone I met at Macworld or 360iDev, and unfortunately, I don't remember who told me about it. But the recommendation was great, and now I'm passing it on to you. As you can see above, Quento is a math-based puzzle game, where you use a grid of ...

Daily iPad App: Letz: The Story of Zed does match 3 right

by Mike Schramm (Dec 27th, 2012)

Letz is a game that doesn't necessarily excel in its mechanics -- it's a match 3 game, basically, though there is a fun addition in the form of a word-making challenge as well. But where Letz really shines is in the icing. The sounds and graphics on this one are just pure sugary pleasure -- the ...

Daily iPhone App: QatQi is a free word game that's different enough to try

by Mike Schramm (Nov 19th, 2012)

QatQi is, I am almost sorry to say, a new word game on the App Store. To be quite honest, I'm tired of spelling things out on my iPad's screen. That's not to say that there aren't good word games out there. Spelltower and Puzzlejuice are two great recommendations, but it's easier than ever ...

Daily iPad App: Puzzlejuice

by Mike Schramm (Jan 23rd, 2012)

Puzzlejuice is an inventive new game from the creators of Solipskier. Mike and Greg's Greg Wohlwend and partner Asher Vollmer have created a hardcore puzzle game that spans the genre and lets you sort it all out. The basic mechanic of Puzzlejuice is more or less that of Tetris. Blocks fall from ...

Spell it out with your Dock

by Robert Palmer (Jun 24th, 2009)

For your early-afternoon entertainment, I have the story of Mike Giepert, who happened one day to spell something clever with the icons in his dock. His website, in fact, has a whole raft of these sets, including those submitted by his readers, to spell everything from "vamp" to "agoraphobic." What ...

How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges?

by Robert Palmer (Nov 5th, 2008)

Newer updates to Mac OS X Leopard seem to have an interesting problem with their spelling databases: they include words that are most certainly wrong. The problem first appeared in 10.5.2 (U.S. English), and has not yet been corrected. Canspice.org points to an Ars Technica discussion from March ...

Zut alors! MacBook announcement doesn't translate well

by Robert Palmer (Oct 15th, 2008)

Thanks to what appears to be a character encoding problem on a French version of the Apple website, the MacBook announcement -- meant to say "perfectly designed" in French -- came out reading "perfectly dumb" (or as one of our tipsters said, a more vulgar version of "perfectly poopy"). That wasn't ...

A typing tutor for the iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Dec 15th, 2007)

A while back, we reported on a study that (not only had all kinds of holes in it, but) claimed the iPhone's keyboard was two times slower than other phones. But as many commenters said, the keyboard just requires practice. And there's no better way to get it than to jump into a typing tutor. We've ...

Typinator 2.0 released with a flood of new features

by David Chartier (Jun 9th, 2007)

Typing tools that increase your efficiency are all the rage for anyone who has to type more than their name and credit card number on a daily basis, and ergonis just upped the ante with the release of Typinator 2.0. Competing directly with similar tools like TextExpander and TypeIt4Me, this new ...

Edit Mac OS X's custom spelling dictionary

by David Chartier (Aug 12th, 2006)

Mac OS X's built-in spell checking abilities are fantastic, but what if you need to edit the custom list of words you've been building, or you want to nail a few birds with one stone by adding a collection of words in one fell swoop? Christopher Breen at Macworld has a good tip for just such a ...

Open letter to Mozilla: Where Firefox goes wrong on OS X

by David Chartier (Jan 3rd, 2006)

Firefox, inarguably, is one of the coolest browsers available and a necessity if you're using Windows. On OS X however, I've been on the fence during Firefox's existence as there are a number of ways that Firefox and Mozilla have gone wrong and ruined the browser's user experience. First up is ...