Apple is great at including features in their Operating Systems to make creating professional documents easy. These features include a built in Dictionary, Spell Checker, Voice Commands and many others. Dictionary for the Mac includes a New Oxford American Dictionary, a Thesaurus, Apple’s Dictionary, and the entire Wikipedia Encyclopedia to help one with creating compelling and factual documents.
Spellcheck is built into the OS and available in TextEdit, Mail, and many other applications to help identify when spelling mistakes or typos have been made. A small redline appears below words in question to help quickly see when mistakes may have been made. A single right click on the word makes it easy to find the correctly spelled word.
Apple language tools are not without weakness. The built in grammar check software for OS X is so poor and inaccurate it fails at correctly identifying grammar mistakes in even the worst scam email from Nigeria. It fails to identify correctly when “then” or “than” should be used and never really seems to find any grammar mistakes. In fact, the grammar check feature is not enabled by default. It seems that Grammar is the black sheep of Apple’s language toolkit.
Why Apple Should Buy Grammarly
Apple could easily solve this weakness in their toolkit. With cash reserves in the billions and the continual push by the market for more tools in the cloud, it only makes sense for Apple to consider picking up a web-based grammar check tool like Grammarly. Grammarly is already being used by universities around the US and offers grammar checking, plagiarism checking, and vocabulary enhancement tools for its users. The grammar checking service itself includes 150+ grammar checks to help ensure your documents are professional and accurate.
Adding a grammar checking tool to future releases of OS X would only help make Apple’s OS even better. The little features and capabilities are what makes OS X so great.
If Apple plans to continue to push into the cloud service and utilize the large data centers they’ve invested in, than integrating Grammarly into their line-up would make even more sense. Imagine a web based Pages software suite designed to compete with Google Docs and Microsoft Office. Grammarly could be a key ingredient to making that software stand out amongst the competitors.
Currently, Google Docs does not have any Grammar checking tools. Google’s user base is unable to check their written work for accurate grammar. If Apple decides it wants to compete in the online document creation market then they need a collection of features that Google Docs and Microsoft does not have. Grammarly’s technology could be one of those features.
A Complete Assistance Suite
Their built in spell check, dictionary, addition of Nuance voice controls, and a grammar corrector like Grammarly would be a professional writers dream. Combined, these pieces of software would allow you to dictate your written work, read it back to you, insure proper spelling and word use, find where your grammar is incorrect and make recommendations on how to fix it. I imagine my own productivity would increase. I’d easily be able to ensure that my next blog post sounds better than the scam email from Nigeria that I mentioned earlier.
Being able to create documents on my iMac, jump to my iPad and access it with Pages, or through a web browser while at work would be terrific. Apple is skilled at making sure their products work flawlessly on all platforms. Having features like spell check and grammar check on all devices can make all the difference and Grammarly appears to be a perfect match for such functionality.
See our latest Grammarly overview & review here.
Update: Just came across a Huffington Post covering Grammarly. College Kids with Grammar Problems? College Kids with Macs? Seems like a solution Apple could provide quickly.
