Lee came up with this entry for Apple Bug Friday, with my help: Mac OS X spell-checker doesn’t check spelling on focus change. It’s pretty annoying if you think about it.
Michael Tsai brought up a good point that what if you type an e-mail body first, then fill in the e-mail address, and the subject last, then click send. The subject consequently never loses focus after the last word is typed, preventing the opportunity to auto-spell check it. That would probably be a circumstance where nothing can be done, unless the behavior change such that a word dynamically was checked and underlined until it was detected as correct. I don’t think I’d like that behavior, but it would be one way to attempt an improvement.
Isn’t that how Word already works? I agree it’s not a perfect solution, and it seems like it would require more CPU usage than the current solution, but it’s probably workable.
An option in a program like Mail would also be to spell-check when “send” was clicked, and then flag any errors in the last field before sending. Put up a dialog, say “You’re trying to send a message with [word] misspelled. Do you really want to do that?” or something.
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