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After the Deadline now checks your grammar, spelling on Google Chrome!
We've covered After the Deadline before -- from its emergence as a WordPress plug-in to the arrival of the Firefox extension. Now, Google Chrome users can get in on the grammar-y goodness: After the Deadline is now available from the Chrome Extension Gallery.
The new extension is loaded with options, allowing you to whitelist certain phrases and websites, automatically check textareas prior to submission, and optionally look for bias language, clichés, double negatives, and more.
In addition to English, ATD also supports French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. As with most grammar checking tools, After the Deadline isn't perfect. It didn't catch some intentional errors I threw at it like a random capitalized word in the middle of a sentence or misplaced or things that had been shuffled around. For example, "Where I am going at?" avoided detection.
When ATD does spot something wrong, it gets underlined. Click one, and you can see what kind of error was detected, possible replacements, and a link to an explanation. You can also ignore a particular error -- or choose ignore to never be bugged about it again.
Still, having After the Deadline installed is better than no grammar check at all -- especially if you need the things you type in Chrome to look erudite and professional.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsJohn K.May 6th 2010 10:01AM
Doesn't chrome come with it's own inbuilt spell checker? I usually see a basic spell check like feature whenever I type in chrome.
Lee MathewsMay 6th 2010 10:17AM
It does, yes...ATD adds grammar checking, though -- which is a pretty major addition if you're a heavy communicator or writer.
John K.May 6th 2010 10:26AM
Oh I see. Grammar check would be an awesome thing, especially in this day in age of comments like 'i rlly like ur profl pic!'. wtf? I just noticed something weird, it just spell checked this post and offered suggestions and now I can't enter a new line. The text is underlined so it's working as expected, it just won't let me enter a new line/paragraph until I click on the 'abc' icon in the bottom corner. I hope it's not a feature!
Raphael MMay 6th 2010 11:44AM
Thanks for this write-up on AtD. I'm excited about this release and I believe it will make the many users who requested this quite happy. That said, I have a few follow-up responses:
@Lee - what site are you experiencing the menu cut-off on? I'm unable to reproduce this behavior in the beta or stable channels of Chrome on Windows. AtD inherits CSS from the parent editor to make the experience more seamless. I suspect a z-order or overflow property from the test site is causing this.
@JohnK - when you click the AtD button, you're in a proofreading mode. You can interact with your errors and edit your text. I disable the enter key in this mode because some editors add a newline and others add an HTML tag when enter is pressed. AtD doesn't know what to do, so it does nothing.
Lee MathewsMay 6th 2010 11:44AM
Well, that's a bummer. That's from our internal CMS. :|
VVMay 6th 2010 2:04PM
From the first screenshot:
"Bias language"?
Shouldn't that be "Biased language"? "Bias" is a noun. "Biased" is a verb. Unless there is a new language called "Bias", of course.
Tim BMay 6th 2010 2:28PM
This seems to cause problems in gmail with the latest dev release of Chrome.
Compose a new email in gmail and type the following: "This is a test.". Click the ABC button. So far everything should work as expected. Now try typing "This is a test." again. Some letters do not show up and I end up with the following "hi i tt". Weird.
Raphael MMay 6th 2010 4:06PM
I use (and tested with) GMail extensively. The latest beta works fine and until that came out I was developing with (what was) the latest dev release. As I understand it, things can break in the dev releases and that's to be expected. I'll look into this.