Clearly things are changing. With the resurgence of Javascript and the un-blacklisting of Flash, web apps are becoming a realistic alternative to their desktop equivalents. I got to have a play with Zimbra at EuroOSCON and it was very good. Today I see that Laszlomail has finally put up a demo and it too is very impressive. Laszlo is a mail client built in flash and it seems to give great performance.
However, after seeing both of these and during the process of writing my own app it reminded me of something I thought of a long while back which was that it would be really nice to have a good webservice for spellchecking.
Rather than having to build all of the back end of spellchecking it would be so much easier to register your client with the service behind the scenes and then pump requests to and from your and their servers. Better still would be if the consumer did actually know about aforementioned service and you could enter their username and tap into their personal spellcheck-exceptions.
I assume this already exists, could anyone point the way?
2 comments:
KevinH
Peter Nixey
Any possibility that you'll make the per-user dictionary functionality available on an API (or even as a paid for service)?
As easy as it is (or may be..) to create a spellcheck service, I'd far rather use one already out there and let my users develop one central dictionary they can use elsewhere.
I left it out of my original post but since you're from Zimbra, is there thoughts of a similar service for contacts? It would be a lot sweeter than sync-ing with GMail/Outlook/LinkedIn etc.
Come to think of it, since revamping MSExchange is clearly too easy for you - how's about you give us Identity 2.0 too ;)