Herbi Phones - Help with Homophones
Herbi Phones can provide reminders to you when you type, to help you with the spelling of words which sound the same. You specify which words you want to get reminders for, and what the reminders should be. For example, say you find it a challenge remembering the spelling of "plain" and "plane". Start Herbi Phones, and add those words with your own tips to help you remember the spelling.
Press the "Apply" button to update Herbi Phones with the changes you made in the list. Go to the program where you want to type something, (for example an e-mail or a document). Whenever you type one of the words shown in the Herbi Phones list, a box will appear above where you're typing showing both the word and the tip. For example:
When you close the Herbi Phones program, the spelling reminders will no longer appear.
Video demonstration of the first version of Herbi Phones
Please excuse the poor quality of this video. I'll replace it with a higher quality version as soon as possible. Also, during the demonstration of Herbi Phones showing reminders in the WordPad program, I incorrectly refer to WordPad as "Notepad".
Watch the Herbi Phones Introduction at YouTube.com.
Installing Herbi Phones on your computer
To download Herbi Phones, click Install Herbi Phones. After clicking on this link, press the "Run" buttons on the first window that appears, and then click the "Next" buttons to continue the installation. Once you've clicked "Close" on the last window to appear, the installation is finished.
You can then run Herbi Phones program from your Start Menu or from the desktop shortcut that looks like this:
Once you've finished with Herbi Phones program you can remove it from your computer by going to the Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs, and removing "Herbi.org Herbi Phones".
Notes on Herbi Phones
There are lots of changes that can be made to Herbi Phones. So please do let me know what changes you'd like to see made, and I'll add your suggestions to the lists of things I need to do. Here are some notes on the way Herbi Phones works today.
The word added to the list can't contain any punctuation except a single quote.
Herbi Phones has only been tested while typing at a US keyboard.
Herbi Phones hasn't been tested in a long list of programs, but it works as expected in Notepad, WordPad, Word, PowerPoint, Hotmail.
The window which shows the words and tips is fairly small and not colourful. The aim is to have the window be a useful reminder, not a distraction. The window could be made larger or contain some colour if that would be useful. It has to respect the computer's current colour settings so that if high contrast colours have been set up to help someone with low vision, the word and tip are still clear.
Herbi Phones only tries to know what word is being typed based on letters pressed at the keyboard. It does not know what the text is in the document where you're typing. So if you type "there" in one go at the keyboard, Herbi Phones will work as expected. But if you type "the" and later go back to add "re" at the end of it, Herbi Phones thinks you typed the word "re", not "there".
You can't add the same word twice in the list, but the program doesn't make that clear.
The list is sorted alphabetically by the word column.
The words and tips you add are stored on your computer in a text file with the word and tip separated by a comma. If you have lots of words and tips you'd like to add, you could edit this file directly, rather than adding everything through the Herbi Phones program.