Still lots of room for improvement!

I’m running with a Dual 2.0Ghz G5, yet I find myself cursing when I try to do 4 things at once and it can’t keep up with me. I did it in the past with my old machines, and I’m sure in 5 years I’ll be doing the same with the hardware then :)

As for typing speed, I don’t think I ever gave you a “words per minute” figure. I am fairly fast, but I have no formal training, and I doubt that I am breaking any records. It’s just that I use a lot of SCX abbreviations, so I think that statistically this increases the chances of the problem occurring for me quite a bit.

I am always hopeful that software will improve in efficiency over time—although I tend to get the impression that there aren’t enough incentives for developers to do so. Microsoft doesn’t have enough competition, Apple seem to always have this tendency of implementing new features that will work best with next year’s hardware, etc. Lots of forces working against software efficiency, or so it seems :).

As for the other shorthand-type utilities on the market, the mechanism they use (all but TypeIt4Me, which is also an input method) will never be as efficient or as powerful as what an input method can do (as far as monitoring events and inserting text into a document).

Some do the “backspace-over-the-abbreviation” thing in a manner other than simply posting x number of backspaces. Something like posting shift-option-left arrow + backspace to select the previous word and delete it, but that can be problematic as it doesn’t always select the exact number of characters you want to backspace over! So more than what you expect gets deleted at those times (data loss, generally recoverable with Undo if you notice).

But it’s true, as far as the problem you have when typing 180 wpm (or whatever the crazy figure you told me at one point) and typing other abbreviations while one is expanding, it is something I could deal with on my end. Thing is, the solution I would have to implement would likely have a negative impact on performance (slight, but a necessary result of the changes that would have to be made). It’s a big change for what really is a very rarely-occurring thing.

If all apps supported the more advanced text input APIs, life would be good. The next beta of Spell Catcher X 10.2.2 will have a TSM Doc Access test mode that developers can use to help test their implementation (the author of the WASTE text engine seemed very interested). Hopefully some (including Apple) will give it a try…

In any case, the performance problems are not with Spell Catcher. They are with the word processors (Word 2004 and Pages) and other applications.

Agreed about multiple processors. But it all boils down to software being optimized to make full use of it. If word processors were properly multithreaded, they too could take advantage of multiple processors. But anyway, a single 2.5 GHz core should provide enough performance to power a word processor :). The problem is with the word processors, which are, as far as I can tell, not well written (although Pages is better than Word, of course).

The stalls in Word are there whether you use a single 450 MHz G4, a dual 1.25 GHz G4 or a G5 Quad. I know. I have experienced them on all three. They are a little less noticeable on the G5 Quad, but they are still there, and they still interfere with my work in a significant fashion.

There is a difference between fast and powerful. A single-threaded app may work much faster on a 3 GHz Core Duo than a 8-proc Power 5 even though the latter is clearly more “powerful”.

All the same, I agree that if one uses a computer 8 hrs a day, and gets irritated by latency, an extra $1-2k to improve one’s quality of life for 2-3 years 8 hrs, 22 days a month… is a good investment.