RECENTLY, I was reminiscing my work past and how wonderful a utility the company I used to work had created for the long defunct Atari ST 16-bit computer and the Apple Mac. The utility in question, Thunder! by Batteries Included (BI). This was a great autocorrecting spelling checker that worked inline with any application. It wasn’t just for auto-correcting wordprocessing.

I thought it would be nice to link to a picture of the packaging or a reference to BI in Wikipedia or some other link so I Googled. Surprise surprise I  came across a link that actually has a surviving Thunder! but under a different name and it is back in the hands of an Canadian publisher/development house. In case you don’t know the short buy out history, BI was eventually bought out by Electronic Arts (EA). I figured that after EA, Thunder! II (Mac), the product would end up in accessory heaven. (History)

It seems that EA went and sold off the program to another publisher and so on and so on and now it is with Rainmaker Research Inc. (RRI) and the original coder of the first Mac version, Evan Gross. Whew! What a whirlwind of a life for the application. RRI maintains a Macintosh version and they also have a Windows version.

So, back on track to why I started writing this. I was thinking wouldn’t it be interesting to apply the way mobile phone users text (SMS – Short Message Service) using the mobile phone keypad but transpose that to a desktop or notebook computer. This could be useful for handicapped users where they would only need to use a 3 x 4 or 4 x 4 keypad.

A little background on the way of old (before Tegic T9) where users used to, and many still do, tap-tap-tap to get the correct letter to form the word. This can be time consuming but if you can apply some shorthand (auto-correction) to a simplified input you don’t actually save on the amount of characters you need to type on a real qwerty keyboard but if you are so comfortable using the mobile phone text-ing or you are handicapped this could make the user more at ease and be less taxing (in the visual aspect, touch typing – hunt and peck, and surely others).

Take, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” as an example of a sentence to type. On a real qwerty keyboard you would be jumping all over because this particular sentence intentionally uses every letter of the alphabet and has you criss-crossing the keyboard for letters.

Jump to Microsoft Word’s Auto-Correction feature or I believe RRI’s SpellCatcher now that I have found it is still in existence. The table below illustrates the basic number press combinations that would translate to the letter choice. I have left out the fact that you’d have to press the numbers numerous times to select the specific letter.

If we program MS Word Auto-Correction to automatically replace the numeric combination you could easily create an entire dictionary of auto-corrected numerics-to-text (words). There is one problem however – mobile phone keypads start with 1 on the top while the keyboard numeric pad has 1  at the bottom. So, in the interest of making phone keypad and numeric keypad input similar the table shows the phone keypad, numeric keypad and final autocorrect text for reference.

Here is a screen cap of the Auto-Correct options from MS Word 2007.

I’m sure my idea isn’t new or groundbreaking and somebody probably filed for a Patent many moons ago. The key difference in my idea is the addition of the autocorrection or shorthand expansion of the numeric code akin to a mobile phone text message input.

In any case, if you have Microsoft Word and don’t realise the potential of the AutoCorrect feature maybe now is a good time to explore it. Maybe a shorthand (realworld) to complete words autocorrect dictionary offering of sorts would be useful to users. The question is it possible to create and save individual autocorrect dictionary files. Maybe that’s another feature for later.