Mac OS X Leopard only includes spell check support for about 9 distinct languages; English (4 varieties of), German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Danish, and Portugese (2 varieties of). You would think that if you did not speak any of these languages Apple would have provided some downloadable Apple Dictionary dictionaries (.dict) on their site which other foreign language speakers could install. Sadly this is not the case.Recently I was looking to provide Croatian language spell check for a friend and ended up finding a solution for almost all foreign languages!

The solution is the OS X port of Aspell, the open source spell check software, called CocoAspell. CocoAspell installs an OS X System Preference pane and comes bundled with a few dictionaries. Additional spell check dictionaries can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html

There are many Aspell dictionaries, including ones for Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Malay, Croatian, Macedonian, Indonesian, Welsh, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Kurdi, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic and Zulu.

Additional dictionaries are installed by placing the uncompressed dictionary folder in /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell and then re-launching the cocoAspell System Preference pane. Activate the dictionaries by ticking them in the pref pane.Once activated the language you wish to spell check must then be selected in the TextEdit’s ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window: Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar. Apps must be re-launched to recognise the change in dictionary.

CocoAspell only provides spell check support for OS X apps like TextEdit, Safari and Pages, and other 3rd party apps that hook in to Dictionary.app. CocoAspell does not provide spell check support for MS Office for Mac. Spell check solutions for unsupported languages in Word rely on creating a custom dictionary. A tutorial on this process will be published shortly.

Aspell is an active project and new dictionaries are being produced the whole time.

Enjoy!

[ ⌘ / ⌥ / ⎇ / ⏎ / ⌫ / ⏏ / ⌚ ]

We’ve all seen those cool modifier key characters / symbols / fonts / icons in OS X documentation for the command key, control key, shift key and alt key. So where are they buried and how can I get one into a document? Simple:

1. Open System Preferences

2. Go to ‘International’ then ‘Input Menu’

3. Put ticks next to ‘Character Palette’ and ‘Show Input Menu in Menu Bar’



4. Quit System Preferences.

5. Click the flag in the top menu bar and select ‘Show Character Palette’

6. In Character Palette select ‘View > All Characters’

7. Click the disclosure triangle next to ‘Symbols’ and select ‘Technical Symbols’. Here you will also find symbols for delete key, tab key, return key, eject key and many more.



8. Now you can see all your favorite modifier key symbols which you can copy/paste or drag/drop into documents you are creating.

Spotlight is limited. It pretty much only searches in the Users folder and the Applications folder. What if you want to peek into your System folder, or if you’ve misplaced a file somewhere outside of the Users folder?

Try out the locate command from Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities).

1. Launch Terminal

2. To build the locate database we must first type in this command:

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

3. When prompted enter your admin password and wait a few minutes for the database to be built.

4. Using locate, type: locate filename

for example to find all files with the word ‘project’ in the title type: locate project

and to find all aiff files on your Mac type: locate *.aiff

the * in the above command is a wildcard meaning any character(s) at all.

Wildcards

* Matches any character or characters in a filename.

? Matches any one character in a filename.

[ ] Matches one of the characters included inside the [ ] symbols.

For example, suppose that the current directory contains the files:

iphone ilife07 ilife08 ilife09 G3 G4 G5

Some examples of file names and files that would be matched are:

Filename       Files matched

ilife0?……….ilife07 ilife08 ilife09
G[345]……….G3 G4 G5
*……….iphone ilife07 ilife08 ilife09 G3 G4 G5
*5……….G5

Finding the OS X Leopard Intro Music using ‘locate’.

Here’s a fun example, type: locate *.mp3 | grep /System/

grep is a second command that scans the output of the locate command for patterns or names or properties. In the above example it is merely filtering the results to list only those that are in the /System/ path (i.e. the System folder). This way we don’t see your iTunes music collection in the output. The output of the above command is:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Setup\ Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources/intro-sound.mp3

To launch the mp3 from within Terminal (and open it in your default mp3 player), type:

open /System/Library/CoreServices/Setup\ Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources/intro-sound.mp3

or copy the path of the parent folder, /System/Library/CoreServices/Setup Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources/ into a Finder ‘Go To Folder’ Dialog. Finder Menu > Go > ‘Go To Folder’ or ⇧⌘G

Once opened in iTunes or some other audio player you will see the real title of the Leopard Intro Music, MacBuddy_MxEdit_Rev1a

There’s a lot more good stuff buried in the System. Happy Hunting.