Lorimor Studios

The story behind Qspell

Let's face it. It's a struggle to live here in Thailand as a foreigner. I have never made much money, partly because of my hearing handicap (I wear hearing aids). And now, my Thai wife and I are even expecting our first baby in May. I am going to need more income very quickly. So this got me to thinking...

I have just taught myself Ruby on Rails web programming. Perhaps I could come up with an idea for an application that everyone could use. I asked myself, what was it that I really needed? My answer was, "I could really use a spell checker."

You could say that most programs have spell checking built right in, but I find many of them poorly implemented. The spell checker in my favorite programming text editor was just too difficult to use. You could also say that most word processors like Microsoft Word's in-line spell checking works well, but I don't want to open a full-size program just to check one word or phrase.

What I did like was the way Firefox 2 did the spell checking right in the text fields of online forms—it's built right into the browser! And since I always have a browser open anyway when I am building websites, why not use Firefox for the spell checking?

This lead me to create Qspell.com.

I want to stress that there no ground breaking new technology behind Qspell. I am simply using the browser's own ability to spell check forms. Hopefully though, I have made it easier for anyone who wants to use their browser as their spell checker.