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Yes, I'm "that spellchecker guy", and it's not shareware, it is a commercial product which is still supported.

Spellswell was one of the first commercial products for the BeOS and remains a supported commercial product. I won an honorable mention in the Be Master's Awards for bringing Spellswell to the BeOS.

It wasn't the "path to riches" I was seeking - I knew that a new operating system would need a spellchecker as a standard system service just as you, and I felt that the right thing to do in combating the Microsoft Monopoly was to bring this standard system service to the BeOS because I had access to its source code and Working Software's consent to use it for this purpose.

In choosing to develop on a particular platform you are voting with your brain and the fingers you type with; I was voting for the BeOS with my efforts. I was not trying to get rich; what I didn't expect was to get lied to.

Both Spellswell for the BeOS, and Spellswell for the Mac OS, which was bundled with Eudora, use the Word Services Suite, which allows each of them to communicate with a number of word processors and email clients as if Spellswell were a built-in menu item.

Several other products support Word Services, and I have proposed to bring it to XWindows as well.

The Spellswell bundled with Eudora was not shareware either and Working Software was paid a license fee for each copy of Eudora it was bundled with. I trust you honored your license agreement and did not make unauthorized copies of this supported commercial product.

The difficulties that Working Software has had are typical of the troubles that every developer of commercial software has had as a result of their decision to support the BeOS. But these difficulties stem not from poor quality products, but from trusting folks like Jean-Louis Gassee to live up to their word.

Mike

I strongly recommend Seagull Networks at http://www.seagull.net/

Whenever anyone asks me for a hosting recommendation, I always recommend Seagull.

No, Seagull is not an ISP. While it would be nice to have a secure ISP, you're better off using any random joker for your ISP, owning your own domain name so you can relocate it in the event your service tanks (I discuss this in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants) and accessing the hosting service via SSH and SCP (secure copy). Note that it does no good to only use SSH - you have to use SCP as well.

Here's a sample SCP command line, in case you can't figure it out, it's very simple but I had a hard time from the man page:

scp foo.bar crawford@www.goingware.com:.

The above places file foo.bar in the home directory of user crawford on www.goingware.com.

scp crawford@www.goingware.com:web/index.html stash

This copies index.html from directory "web" on www.goingware.com and places it in directory "stash" on the local machine.

Please read my web page on Why You Should Use Encryption

Besides being a good service, it's a small enough company to offer personal service. I've sent support email to the webmaster at 2am his time and had the problem fixed and the mail answered within the hour.

But even though it's a small service, it's not a low-quality service. They have high-performance machines, they are in a good colo facility with a high-speed connection to the backbone, they upgrade their service regularly and the webmaster, Paul Celestin, is just a damn nice guy.

I'm not sure if he still publishes it but Celestin used to produce a CDROM full of useful free source code for the Macintosh. Some of my own Mac open-source programs were on it.

These are the sites I personally have located there:

• http://www.goingware.com/ - My consulting company, GoingWare Inc. My livelihood depends on the reliability of this site.
• http://www.wordservices.org/ - Seagull hosts this public-service site for free in exchange for me placing a small banner ad on some of the pages
• http://www.geometricvisions.com/

In addition, my wife has a couple sites on Seagull through my account, and my friend Andy Hasse used to host http://www.williebrown.com there (yes, if you live in San Francisco you might remember that Hasse was a consultant to mayoral candidate Clint Reilly when the Brown campaign discovered Andy owned the williebrown domain.)

I have a couple tips for you on checking email. I use PGP when I'm trying to be secure, but it's really not that much that I really care for complete security. But I just don't like people snooping on me, mostly I think it's none of their damn business what's in my mailbox even if it's spam.

So mostly I read my email at seagull using elm while logged in via SSH, and when my mailbox gets big, I move it to my home directory and copy it to my home machine via SCP:

goingware$ cp /usr/spool/mail/crawford ~

goingware$ echo "" /usr/spool/mail/crawford

back on my home machine:

C> pscp crawford@www.goingware.com:crawford .

It is also possible to download your email via POP with SSH via port forwarding. I describe this on the BeOS Tip Server. It doesn't seem to be responding right now but if you go to its search and enter "ssh" you'll find the tip I submitted called something like "Secure email download via ssh". The instructions have some BeOS specific items but most of what's there will work on any systems.

Don't have SSH? Try one of these:

• Nifty Telnet/SSH for Macintosh - includes a graphical SCP client!
• putty for Windows (also supports NT/Alpha) and pscp for secure copy
• CygWin - a GNU environment for Win32 - use bash, compile with GCC, a lot of linux code builds right out of the box in Cygwin
• The Secure Shell Community Site
• SSH Communications Security (commercial)

Check out the Word Suite for modular processing of text at:

http://www.wordservices.org

Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.

It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.

It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.

It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.

I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.

I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.

Spellswell is an always has been a profitable product on the MacOS, and one Windows where it is available as an OEM spellchecker.

Even at the lowest point of Apple's difficulties, the MacOS spellswell brought in substantially more revenue than BeOS Spellswell ever did.

The core dictionary engine is the same, only the UI is different between the two products. While the Word Services protocol is different between the two platforms, they work in an analogous way.

A big difference between me and Gobe is that they had funding for marketing and I had no funding at all. The only investment I was able to make on my own was my time. The whole time I was shipping Spellswell I expected Be to get started and get serious about marketing its own product soon. That day never came.

The best thing they did for me was give the OS away for free. But at the same time they stopped development of the desktop OS and made it clear they weren't going to support desktop developers anymore. We don't even get BeOS 5 Pro for free as part of our developer program membership. They shut down the BeWare online software catalog.

Very early on Be promised to make things better for developers in the market by fashioning itself as an Internet company which would promote products online. We wouldn't have to deal with distribution channels anymore but just sell our products through BeDepot. I think that was an excellent idea but their actual execution of it was amazingly incompetent.

It has a lot to do with Be's failure to adopt the Word Services Suite, which is the interapplication communication protocol based on BMessages that enables Spellswell to communicate with other applications.

Rather than take advantage of my work to bring this protocol to the BeOS - it is an open protocol and allows any text service to be linked to an email client, not just spellchecking - Be instead wrote their own spellchecker for email.

The only other email client to implement Word Services on the BeOS, Mail-It from BeatWare became a free product after BeatWare abandoned the BeOS market and ported their ePicture graphics editor to Mac and Windows where it is selling very well.

If you don't think I have good reason to be pissed at Be, why don't you ask Marc Verstaen, the President of Beatware, what he thinks of Be after he and a group of investors wasted several million dollars developing desktop software for the BeOS?

There were only a few substantial commercial companies solely devoted to BeOS development and Beatware was one of the best. Now they are a Mac and Windows shop.

I haven't tried them for colocation services (although I've discussed it with the webmaster) but I heavily recommend Seagull Networks. I use them for hosting several domains I own and always recommend them to people who ask me.

Here's why:

• They allow shell access via telnet and secure shell
• Supporting ssh allows me to use secure copy (scp) to upload content
• I can read my email via a shell login with Pine or Elm without downloading all my mail (important when one uses several operating systems)
• I can write my own CGI's in any programming language I want and install them myself. They provide the gnu development tools.
• They have excellent customer service. I've sent in questions in the middle of the night and got back authoritative answers within the hour.
• Their prices are quite reasonable - $25 a month for basic virtual domain hosting, which might seem high but you get the shell access and secure shell

Write to seagull@seagull.net if you want to ask the webmaster about colocation. That's not really their specialty but hosting is.

I host these domains with them:

• www.goingware.com
• www.wordservices.org
• www.geometricvisions.com

In addition my fiance has two domains there and a friend has two domains there under my account (there's a discount for reselling the service - your first account is free but more under the same billing are cheaper).

Hans Reiser specifically discusses how his aim is a journaling filesystem with keyword searching integrated into the fileystem. He gives address books as an example.

This is done in the BFS filesystem which is part of the BeOS, which you can download here. The "People" address book database in the BeOS is entirely implemented in the filesystem.

The structure and implementation of the filesystem are described in detail by Dominic Giampolo in Practical File System Design with the Be File System, ISBN 1558604979.

I use the BFS in my applications I write for the BeOS - not just to store files, but I specifically use its indexed attributes for fast keyword searching in Word Services for the BeOS and I think it's the best thing since sliced bread.

While Be's implementation of the BFS is proprietary, there is a GPL'ed read-only Linux implementation of it available here

Daniel Berlin, a BeOS developer who also programs on Linux, has provided an update that works with the 2.4 kernel

I don't think the attributes are available from Linux in the Linux version of the BFS, but they could be and to do so I think would be a significant addition to the OS.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

When I was working for Working Software back during the initial release of System 7 for the Macintosh by Apple Computer, I led the development of the Word Services Suite by a group of spelling and grammar checker vendors, word processor publishers, and Apple Computer.

Apple had always promoted the use of its new "Apple Event" technology by giving spellcheckers as an example; instead of propriety OEM spellcheckers that are different for every application, the user could have a single speller that is shared among all their applications. Since Working Software published Spellswell we felt we should take the lead in this.

It works really well and in fact can be used for any text operation, such as grammar checkers, address books, HTML verification and the like. Text encryption would work fine and I was working on a text encryptor but never finished it. I since led the binding of it to the BeOS (where is uses BMessages instead of Apple events) which you can read about here and I'd like to make an XWindows version, perhaps using the Corba API's provided by Gnome.

Recently I was contacted by someone who was searching for prior art. It seems someone patented interapplication spellchecking protocols and he has the hope that Word Services was developed early enough to invalidate that patent. I don't know the patent in question or who holds the patent.

What I especially have a gripe about is that I only started working on this method because the idea of it had been promoted for several years by Apple as an obvious application of a new technology they were promoting.

Mike

When I was working for Working Software back during the initial release of System 7 for the Macintosh by Apple Computer, I led the development of the Word Services Suite by a group of spelling and grammar checker vendors, word processor publishers, and Apple Computer.

Apple had always promoted the use of its new "Apple Event" technology by giving spellcheckers as an example; instead of propriety OEM spellcheckers that are different for every application, the user could have a single speller that is shared among all their applications. Since Working Software published Spellswell we felt we should take the lead in this.

It works really well and in fact can be used for any text operation, such as grammar checkers, address books, HTML verification and the like. Text encryption would work fine and I was working on a text encryptor but never finished it. I since led the binding of it to the BeOS (where is uses BMessages instead of Apple events) which you can read about here and I'd like to make an XWindows version, perhaps using the Corba API's provided by Gnome.

Recently I was contacted by someone who was searching for prior art. It seems someone patented interapplication spellchecking protocols and he has the hope that Word Services was developed early enough to invalidate that patent. I don't know the patent in question or who holds the patent.

What I especially have a gripe about is that I only started working on this method because the idea of it had been promoted for several years by Apple as an obvious application of a new technology they were promoting.

Mike

I wore the wrong shirt for my photo in the Metro article.

I wore my BeOS Master's Award polo shirt that I won (honorable mention) for porting Spellswell from MacOS to the BeOS

(It uses a protocol called Word Services that links word processors and email clients to spellers and other text services (including text encryption); the award was as much for bringing Word Services to the BeOS as for Spellswell itself. I plan to do the same for Linux soon, possibly through the CORBA techniques they use in Gnome - http://www.gnome.org seems to be down or I'd link to the relevant page there.)

I'm pretty active in the Be developer community.

I'm also pretty critical of Be because of their complete lack of any sense as far as managing the business and handling developer relations and I have no qualms about making my views known to them and other developers, both in public and in private discussions.

I've always been a shy and quiet person but there's something about living through experiences such as I've had that makes such things as speaking up in public about mere work matters pretty easy in comparison.

Remember my sig: Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. Words I live by.

I thought it would provoke quite a lively response to post the link to the Metro article to BeUserTalk and BeDevTalk. I got a couple private responses and one public one. I was very glad to get the responses I did get though.

On the other hand, I submitted this article to Slashdot but figured it wouldn't get posted, considering the dozens of articles I've submitted that I think were more directly relevant to open source programming, privacy, free speech, encryption and so on, but this is the one that gets on.

And my manic depression page, which grew to get 3000 hits last month (it's linked from some bipolar sites and the bipolar category on Yahoo), has gotten 4800 hits in ten hours.

No, I should have worn my Release Your Inner Nerd t-shirt that I bought from the Slashdot booth at the Linuxworld Expo in San Jose a while back.

(Wore it shopping for wedding supplies with my fiance the other day :-) ).

Michael D. Crawford