Oh how I have become a slave to thee. I read and reread the last post and no little red underline showed up for ‘ownes’. D’oh! It is all part of my on going frustration with applications that do not have consistent behavior. Now I know that MarsEdit, which is what I’m using to write my posts, doesn’t spell check inside of title fields, tag fields or html tags. Yesterday it was iTunes not allowing in field editing of id3 tags for columns that do not show by default.
Note to everyone that does user interface design. If you allow someone to do something, allow it everywhere that is similar. Finally, try to be consistent with your environment unless you have a hard requirement to break the interface paradigm. Even then, try not to break the paradigm.
It’s tricky to get it 100% right. It would be annoying to people for instance, if the spell checker went off every time they use a compound word that is a spelling error, yet common in tagging. For instance, “readinglist”.
Take another look at MarsEdit’s spelling behavior though, and I think you’ll find that it does spell-check in the Title field, and to some extent inside HTML tags. For instance, try typing this:
<a name=”helloz”>
You’ll see that it spell-checks the misspelling of hello as you’re typing it, but once it colorizes the HTML block the spell-checking goes away.
Wow, wasn’t expecting someone from Red Sweater to comment on my post about their product. Anyways, MarsEdit does spell check inside of the title field so I must be blind today. I did discover though that the dotted red line disappears when you leave the field. I find it odd that it appears and disappears when focus changes, it does not do this for the body of the post.
The title field was my actual complaint and the part about the tags field and html tags was a note to myself to double-double check spelling inside of them. I agree that there is no perfect way for spell check to work in regards to everyones way of working.
Long story short, I still stand by my complaint in general.
You’ve made an astute observation with regard to the title field’s spell-checking going away when you’re not focused on it. This is probably a side-effect of a technicality of how small text fields like that differ from larger “text editor areas” on Mac OS X. I agree it would be best if the spelling stayed visible, maybe I can figure out a way to achieve that.
Daniel