Ginger

I know this is a bit off topic - its not about ubicomp in the traditional sense. But it is about word crunching the life of most academics and indeed many office workers in the country.

I'm both pleased and disappointed with Ginger this quite funky grammar checking software. As  dyslexic I'm quite pleased when the software finds and corrects and error. Quite wonderful.

On the other hand they decided that for some reason they would only make it on a PC and for some very strange reason this is not a separate application but also an application which is a set of macros for word. I've never been happy about the long term viability or usability of an application embedded in another. I Use a mac and got an upgrade to a new mac AND a copy of VM ware just to make it work with Ginger.

My first problem is that Ginger needs an internet connection to work. Which is pain - I can only use it at a desk in my lab the University is funny about what can and cannot connect to the internet. Naturally I do most of my real writing on a laptop - no one can seriously crunch words in the open plan office we are required to work in at the OU. I have a mac - most of the computing people appear to - so I run the PC emulator to get the PC version of word so I can run the PC version of Ginger . This means I have to hang off checking documents until I'm in work and can connect up to one of the few free ports.

One of my problems with Ginger is that if you do something like resize a window then you loose this odd tab. You need the odd tab to start Ginger - it claims you can use F2 which occasionally works but more often starts up the very slow Microsoft help function.

When it works it works but many times Ginger I think gets caught out by the anti-scripting virus checking software  any my only solution is to restart.

Speaking of restarting the PC has restarted now (the PC simulator was restarting in the background) so its back to work.