spelling
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Google Search will help you identify that song stuck in your head
Over a billion people every day use Google Search, the company said. Today, the company announced a set of updates that can make Search easier to use, and the most notable of these is a new “Hum to Search” feature that’s avalable today.
Gmail AI will automatically correct your spelling slip-ups
Google Docs' AI corrections are spreading to Gmail. Google is rolling out a feature in G Suite that will autocorrect "common" spelling errors while you write Gmail messages. It won't catch every mistake, but it should save you the embarrassment of leaving a glaring typo in a company-wide email. You'll also see grammar suggestions, too, helping you avoid common mistakes like confusing "affect" with "effect."
Google knows which words you have trouble spelling
To celebrate the culmination of Scripps' National Spelling Bee, Google decided to find out what words most Americans struggle with. The search engine aggregated every query that began with "how to spell" and then identified which one was the most popular in each state. Surprisingly, "diarrhea" isn't the word most people struggle with, which is "desert" and / or "cancelled," depending on where you live. Other terms that have users stumped include "neighbor," "vacuum," "gray" and "pneumonia" -- the latter of which is a preoccupation for the folks in Washington State, Missouri and North Carolina. We're not sure that the results say anything meaningful except to make us wonder why Utah and Arkansas are so preoccupied with leprechauns. Oh, and people who live in Massachusetts don't know how to spell Massachusetts. Here's a tip, then: It's spelled Massachusetts.
Spell World is a hard, confusing adventure powered by words
Spell World takes you on an adventure that only moves forward with the power of your vocabulary. At its core, it's just a grid of letters with words hidden in them and you are only able to create words out of letters that are either diagonal or adjacent to each other. Throw in a story line and more enticing objectives and you have Spell World in its entirety. Completing the puzzles and moving forward helps save the "Dudes" from their evil king. The game is free with in-app purchases for iPhone and iPad and requires iOS 7.0 or later. Above the grid of letters is a progress bar. Every time you form a word, it fills a bit and turns green. As time passes when you're trying to figure out words though, the progress bar slowly depletes and turns from green to red. This is my hell in Spell World. It puts the pressure on you to not just find a word in the grid, but do it in a timely fashion. Finding a word is hard enough. I'm not joking - this game is seriously difficult. It doesn't seem like it would be, but trying to find patterns in the letters only diagonal or adjacent on such a small grid doesn't immediately come naturally. SpellTower executes this far better. Words only need to be three letters long, but my instinct is to always go for the longer word to gain more points, but that actually seems to put one at a disadvantage. Spell World isn't difficult in a cutesy, addictive way. It's frustratingly difficult. Although once you start to aim for the smaller words, the game gets a bit easier, but even then that progress bar remains to haunt you and starts to drain faster with each round. Of course there's also the storyline of the game to follow along with. At the very top is a small Dude making his way through the level with your guidance. It's a side-scroller but the only way he moves, defeats enemies and reaches goals is through the words you make. The longer the word, the farther he moves each time, though making smaller words more frequently is also effective. There are some in-game tools to help you out. Along the bottom are three colorful squares, but I promise they're more than just shapes. These buttons are for swapping out for an entirely new board of letters, picking out one letter and swapping its place with another or even finding a word for you. When you run out of the few cheats you get to start with, you have to buy more stars to get more cheats. A pack of five stars is US$0.99, which is a little pricey. The game also has other in-app purchases like packs of lives for when you fail or bonus letters in the grid. The current version of Spell World crashed every other time I played the game, at least. That was as frustrating as the game itself. Plus, even though many apps have not updated with support for iPhone 6, the graphics here look particularly fuzzy. Spell World tries to be too many things at once and ultimately falls flat. The word game portion passes enjoyable addictive territory into just plain annoying, the storyline is less than exciting and the in-app purchases are on the expensive side. It's an interesting attempt, but doesn't fare in the end. The game is available for iOS in the App Store.
Daily iPhone App: Letter Rush puts a new spin on spelling games
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 different enough that it's worth mentioning: It's a word game that will probably make you better at word games. Most word games give you a set of tiles and ask you to spell words with them, and Letter Rush does that as well. But this game also gives you the words to spell, as they move across the top of the screen towards the left. That makes it a much different game than usual -- it's more about learning to spot words than actually spell them. And it could even teach you to be better at word games, to look for ways to spell certain words that might not be readily apparent at first. The goal is to spell all the words on screen before they hit the left side, but you do have a few extra powerups helping you out. Occasionally, words will have blanks in them, and in that case, you can use any letter in that spot (though that sometimes backfires, as it appears the word still needs to be legit, so there may be only one letter that fits in that space). And sometimes you'll get a bomb letter tile, which, when used, will clear the entire board for you. The game is essentially endless, but when words reach the far side of the screen, it's game over. Letter Rush is an interesting take on the oft-visited word game genre, and it's different enough that it's worth a look even if you're bored of spelling games on the iPhone. Letter Rush is available as a free download right now.
DevJuice: Spellchecking short strings
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 colors to my repository, along with code that matched colors to their nearest xkcd equivalents. What I found is that as delightful as the sourced color descriptions are, that they were rather full of misspellings, for example "urple." So I put together a simple NSString category to find misspellings and "creatively" described colors. I found this approach to be useful enough that I decided to share it on a DevJuice. Normally, you use text checkers to find misspellings in text view and fields, and to present those items to the user. But you're certainly not limited to that scenario. This simple string category lets you test whether a misspelled word was found, enabling me to automate my inspection. I loaded up the xkcd names as an array and searched them to find any potential errors. Out of nearly a thousand color names, it quickly flagged about two dozen issues -- saving a huge amount of detail checking. This doesn't of course, guarantee the correctness of my results. I know I left in a few amusing misspellings: "Blurple," for example, plus if any misspellings ended up as a legal English word, they will not have been flagged. What's more, I had to bowdlerize some entries. Apple does not have any "offensive language" tester that I could find. (Know of one? Please ping me about it!) So I had to update those items by hand. In any case, I hope you'll find this useful. Happy coding!
Chrome 26 beta adds context-aware spelling checks so you kan rite gud
We've all grown a little complacent with our spelling now that auto-correction has filtered down to the OS level, and that creates problems when we use browsers that aren't quite so diligent. Those who grab Google's Chrome 26 beta, though, will get an extra safety net for their writing skills. Chrome OS, Linux and Windows users receive an optional, cloud-synced spelling engine that watches for errors in context and pays attention to broader grammatical issues. The engine also covers a much wider range of proper nouns, so it's less likely to throw a red flag when unique subjects are involved. Mac users and non-English writers will have to wait for matching support; everyone else can hit the source link to avoid future typographical train wrecks.
Daily iPhone App: Quento is a spelling game, but with math
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 numbers and symbols to try and put them together into a target number. The game's interface is actually half the fun -- like the popular word game Letterpress, Quento is very stylishly designed, and as you complete each target number in the puzzle, it gets replaced in the menu above. You can swipe the little menu right or left to go up to harder difficulty modes, or down to a "free play" mode (where you just get a number to make, and you can use any combination to make it). The game is casual, obviously, but it's not necessarily easy -- at times, I found myself racking my brain to try and line the numbers up right. But there's always an answer in there, and no matter what your math knowledge is like, Quento does a great job of rewarding concentration and smart gameplay. You can pick it up now as a free, universal app.
Daily iPad App: Letz: The Story of Zed does match 3 right
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 kind of great bleeps and bloops that you hear on the floor of a casino when everyone around you is winning lots of money. Ok, so maybe it's not for everyone, but I am completely charmed by Letz's cotton candy graphics and all the sounds the game makes. Match 3 isn't that complicated a game form, obviously, and that's what you're doing here (though you can collect letters as you match tiles, and then match those letters up into words, including one story word per stage in the campaign as you play through it). But despite the simplicity, the game's big board allows you to chain tiles and shapes to your heart's content, sometimes getting up to a minute or two of dings, rings and rewards for just the right match. An XP system with plenty of objectives also keeps the action interesting, and the whole package is just excellently charming throughout the game's huge amount of content. Letz (full title, The Story of Zed) is a bargain for just US$1.99 on the iPad. It's a very well-polished game that's almost excessively rewarding, and match 3 aficionados especially will have a great time with it. If you've yet to be convinced, there's a lite version to try out as well.
Daily iPhone App: QatQi is a free word game that's different enough to try
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 these days to get all word-gamed out. I still recommend QatQi. It doesn't exactly transcend its word game roots. It has a lot in common with crossword puzzles, which are some of the oldest word games out there, but it's stylish and well-designed enough that it's worth downloading and playing a few levels to see if you like it. As you can see in the video below, the biggest twist is that you're building words on a limited playing space. Not only do you need to arrange your letters in the right order, but you need to do so within a confined grid, trying to earn as many points as possible. QatQi (pronounced "cat-key") is free, which makes it all the more appetizing. There's a lot of content too: One puzzle for every day in a year, which is very impressive. The app's paid for with in-app purchases in the form of undos, but I found that there were plenty of free undos to be had before I had to spend anything. Even if you're as burned out on word games as I am, QatQi's still worth a look.
Daily iPad App: Puzzlejuice
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 the top of the screen which you must arrange into complete lines. Once you do, however, they don't disappear. Instead, the blocks become a row of letters, which you must arrange to complete words (similar to the great Spelltower) for points. Tapping on colored blocks in matched rows of three or more turns them into letters too, and depending on which mode you're in, matched words will also explode other blocks, and powerups may even drop in the blocks you're matching. Acheivements like spelling a word of a certain length also keep you on your toes, as does powerup management. If that sounds confusing, you're right, especially since it all happens at once. I imagine the creators wanted to create a mild panic in their players. Puzzlejuice is not for the faint of puzzle heart. Even the game's Zen mode is called "Zen mode Extreme," because you can only play it for the highest score in just 90 seconds. The game's tone even pushes that line a little bit, prompting you to increase the difficulty and then rating your performance as "average." If that appeals to you (and as a puzzle game aficionado, I sure like it), go and find it. Puzzlejuice is available on the App Store in a universal version for just 99 cents. It's a solid game, but bring your brain, because you'll need it.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: All the community news that's fit to print
In a city marked by constant alien invasions, assaults from an island controlled by a sadistic villain, rampant street crime, and various technological and magical disasters, there's always something to talk about. There's usually more than a few things for players to talk about on top of that, which certainly helps keep our interest in City of Heroes even when we're not right in the thick of things. After all, whatever else you might say about the game and its flaws -- it's fun. It gives you a fun ride of being a superhero or supervillain. If you can't enjoy a conversation about that, really, you're just plain getting jaded. Naturally, having discussions about nothing more than "it's fun" would get a little old, but that's certainly not all of the discussions about the game. Just about half. Today, we're taking a look at some of the other half, spotlighting some of the most interesting, though-provoking, or just plain funny discussions and threads coming out of the City of Heroes community.
Totem Talk: Enhancement 201, spell selection
Rich Maloy is currently working on a distributed processing application called SimIt!@HOME which will calculate all possible enhancement shaman spell rotations for any possible situation given any gear combination. The application will also have an option to calculate all potential scenarios in which "sim it" is a half-a** answer but you should say it anyway. If I told you the enhancement shaman basic spell rotation was: SR, FE, SW, MW5_LB, MT(0), LS(1), ES_SS, SS, FS, ES, LL, FN would you run away screaming? What if I told you that was just for single target boss encounters and there's a different priority for boss fights that require changing targets, another priority for boss fights with heavy adds, and yet another priority for trash mobs. Scared yet? It's OK. Please come back. This is what we Enhancers have bouncing around in our head. I'll make everything alright by breaking it down into a few easy-to-remember chunks. Because we all like chunks.
The Daily Grind: Your a idiot
No, YOU aren't an idiot, it's just one of the many things you'll see in local chat in pretty much any given MMO. For obvious reasons, we're sticklers for spelling and grammar (speeling and grammer?) here at Massively. The ever-increasing spelling and grammar issues in local chat hurt our poor eyes when we play our favorite games, and we want to know: is it just us? lol using lol as punctuation lol, us1ng numb3rs 1nstead 0f l3tt3rs because you are just that cool, and a complete lack of anything resembling proper grammar or capitalization are pretty much the norm in-game. If you mention it, you're (ur?) sure to hear "lol its not skool lol". Most of the time we just give up in despair and try to ignore local chat. But we want to know what you think! Do you strive for at least basic spelling and punctuation? Do you follow all the rules of grammar, or do you strive for extreme txtspk?
Editorial: The Engadget style guide reaches a MILESTONE
So last week the New York Times Magazine published a piece called "Against Camel Case" which argues that intercapped product names like iPhone and TiVo are "medieval," because they harken back to a time in which people mostly read aloud, slowly sounding out each word as they tried to understand them. Proper word spacing, says the Times, "eventually made possible phenomena like irony, pornography and freedom of conscience." That's sort of a crazy coincidence -- while we're not so sure word spacing and porn have anything to do with each other, we did just re-do our style guide when we launched our jazzy new redesign, and we actually thought long and hard about how to handle intercapped, all-capped, and otherwise non-standard product names. This is something we deal with a hundred times a day, and we simply weren't going to let Motorola tell us to write MILESTONE over and over again, completely contradicting our own sense of style and taste -- as the Times says, "Writers of the world, fight back!" Well, we can't say no to that, so we thought we'd share our four newly-minted rules for writing out non-standard product names: Product and company names that are regular English words shall be treated like proper English nouns, complete with proper capitalization. Example: DROID becomes Droid and nook becomes Nook. Product and company names that are not regular English words shall be capitalized first as proper nouns, and then as the company treats them. Example: RAZR stays RAZR, but chumby would become Chumby. Intercapped product and company names should generally be treated as the company treats them, unless it's egregious and / or looks weird. Example: iPhone stays iPhone, BlackBerry stays BlackBerry and TiVo stays TiVo, but ASUSTeK becomes Asustek. This rule is subject to many exceptions based on usage and history, and also functions as the "this is stupid" loophole. Acronyms should obviously be in all-caps. We think these rules are flexible to handle most situations, although there are some edge cases and blatant Rule 3 violations out there. Still, it's a start -- unlike the Times, we're pretty sure "iPhone" and "MasterCard" are here to stay, but we feel like our rules are a small step towards making our site clearer and more readable. Either that, or we're just crazy in the head.
Spell the day away with Boggle on iPhone
EA Mobile certainly hopes your fascination with crafting words from letter-filled grids on your iPhone hasn't waned -- the developer recently released a port of Hasbro's Boggle onto the App Store. Though it lacks Word Scramble's robust multiplayer system (and free-ness), it does possess one feature that justifies its $2.99 price tag: Achievements. Lots of achievements. Seriously, wordsmithing hasn't been this rewarding since you won those tickets to Dollywood in your fourth grade spelling bee. We take it back. This is way more rewarding than that. Boggle ($2.99, EA Mobile):
Spell it out with your Dock
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 can you come up with? Feel free to take your own screenshots, add them to our TUAW Flickr Pool and leave a comment!
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Shaman
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twentieth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. Long long ago, human beings all around the world (of Earth, not Warcraft) investigated different ways of describing how the world around them worked. Many different cultures found that the materials they encountered seemed divided into four or five separate elements, each with its own properties: earth, fire, water, and air. Space, "void," or "aether" was often noted as the fifth element, or, as in the case of China, the understanding of these elements looked a lot different but in the end produced a similar sort of system.In Azeroth, however, these ideas about the elements never got swallowed up by modern science and the periodic table of elements. They turned out to be real forces in the world, each with its own set of elemental spirits, which people could communicate and cooperate with. Shamans are the masters of this magical task, charged with helping to maintain the balance of nature in a very different way from druids. While druids are focused more on nature as a system of energy, life, and growth, shamans focus more on the spirits of the land, flames, waters and skies as they all interact with one another. They gain great wisdom by learning of the different characteristics of these elements, and in turn bring this wisdom to the people they serve.
Blizzard misspells "Arthus" in Wrath's box
In the product catalog that comes with Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard misspells Arthas as "Arthus" on page six. It's pictured above for those of you not digging through your stuff to grab the catalog and see for yourself.I'm not going to criticize the folks at Blizzard for making a spelling mistake. God only knows that I've made a number of them myself. But usually I do them without an editor or reviewer. But that's just me. I don't know enough about the situation at Blizzard to really comment otherwise.None the less there it is, and you're free to make whatever assumptions you may make about it.Thanks to Knuxx and Taeous for the picture and tip.
How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges?
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 highlighting the misspelling knswledgable. If you open TextEdit, for example, and intentionally misspell the word "knowledgeable" (say, by spelling it "knowledgable"), then control-click to show a spelling suggestion, you might see the erroneous option. The word "cartgriqdge" also appears to be similarly affected. Both words do not appear in the Mac OS X Dictionary application. Urban Dictionary seized upon the new word, defining knswledgable as having "inordinate amounts of knowledge about useless spelling trivia."
