Thursday, June 28, 2007

Dictionaries filled with typos

Why, oh why do most spell check dictionaries allow the user to easily add words to the dictionary but not remove them? Every once a week or so I accidentally add yet another common typo to the list of custom words and then have to go looking through that programs config files searching for the place where it keeps my list-of-typos, find it, and remove it. How do are normal users supposed to deal with this situation? I seem to remember the first few programs I used with this feature used to provide a nice way of going into the custom list of words and editing them. Now they just disappear into the ether and good look trying to convince the computer that "teh" is not a valid word!

Grr..both SeaMonkey and Evolution do this to me. At first I thought it might be accessible by way of the preferences. Since it was a relatively pedestrian setting, I looked in the advanced tab.. Nope, not there... Not in any other either.. Oh well.

Putting a potentially dangerous setting right next to items that are in common use is just bad UI design. Making it incredibly difficult to fix the mistake is downright user hostile. A pox on whoever came up with the bright idea of omitting this setting!

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