One of the reasons I’m glad I started reading the Solution Watch blog, is that Brian really lives up to his goals for the site in finding and solidly reviewing great new “solutions” on the web.  Yesterday he had a great write up about the new Jacuba Spell Checker.  I’ve only played with it for a few hours, but I’ve added it to the comment forms on this site, and I’ve used it on flickr and other pages to check my postings before submitting them.  It’s great to see a nice light-weight free tool to really add a nice basic function to your web experience everywhere.

It’s not at all uncommon to find some type of form or page enhancement that’s available to web designers to incorporate freely into their pages, but what makes Jacuba so cool is that it works in just the same way as a “bookmarklet” or “favelet” in Firefox or Internet Explorer.  As Brian notes in his detailed review of Jacuba, there’s a big hole in not supporting the Opera or Safari browsers, but it’s still fairly new.  I’ve also noticed that it’s styles don’t play perfectly well on my site, but it’s not a huge issue.  I’m surprised at how feature rich and quick it is.  It will let you ignore once, add your own words to your dictionary (stored as cookies on your computer, so if you use more than one computer you might have to repeat yourself here), it’s almost instant in highlighting misspelled words with the familiar Microsoft Office like red squiggly underline, and it’s suggestions are about as reasonable as you get from a desktop application.  It’s little widgets like this that make the hype of Web 2.0 seem a little less crazy.  Check out Brian’s review for more, go get the spell checker in less than a minute, and check the Jacuba blog (started last week) for news and updates.

Last year I spent some time experimenting with ad blocker software.  Since I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer, I wanted to find a program that worked well with both, and after trying a lot of dogs I finally fell in love with Ad Muncher.  I bought myself a license for it as a Christmas gift for myself, and just over 10 months later I notice from its statistics that it’s blocked almost 100,000 ads and estimates that it saved me 774MB in bandwidth from not downloading images and popups.  In all that time it has crashed or caused a problem exactly 0 times.

While the program has an incredible set of detailed advanced options, it’s remarkably easy to install and use without thinking about any of them.  It automatically updates filter lists, and can be programmed to look for new updates, though I can’t recall any new versions coming out in the last year.  To be honest, though, there has been no need for any as the program is one of the most stable pieces of software I have installed and is as feature rich and complete as I could hope for it to be.  It just works with all of my browsers (Flock too), and amazingly it even filters ads in MSN messenger, Zone games, and even will filter the ads in the built-in games like spades and backgammon in Windows XP.  Sometimes when looking at sites I visit often at home on a work or other computer I’m surprised by how cluttered the site seems.  Ad Muncher quickly and transparently collapses entire banners and reclaims the ad space efficiently.  Sometimes there’s a simple “[Munched]” text label indicating that an advertisement has been blocked, but often it simply removes an entire banner area and it’s as if it never was coded into the site.

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Desktop Sidebar is a nifty little information gathering/monitoring tool that I think is pretty cool.  I’ve been using it for about three or four months now.  It arranges information in little panels with overview data, and when you move the mouse over a panel it expands out to show you more.  The “Newsroom” RSS navigator is not very sophisticated, but it’s pretty easy to customize it gather headlines from just about any site.  It stays over on the right side of my screen and I usually tune it out, but occasionally I notice an interesting headline and stop to check it out.  That use of peripheral awareness is exactly what it’s designed for, and it’s pretty good at it.

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