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July 4, 2007

OS-Level Autocomplete

LetMeType is a small Windows tool that extends the concept of autocomplete at the operating system's level. The application runs in the background, monitoring everything you type in any input box and creating a database of frequent words and 2-grams. When you start typing a word, LetMeType displays a list of the most probable words that start with the letters you've just typed and you can select one of the options.


The program lets you select different values for the length of the words, and for the minimum probability of a suggestion. This works well especially for long or complicated words.

The interface is not very user-friendly, but program has been open sourced and you can improve it. It would be nice to combine this with Google Suggest and to make it less annoying by only making suggestions when the user requests it or when the next letters/words are obvious.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for your suggestion.

    Since it is monitoring everything we are typing, I would not use it were it not open-sourced. The chance of it being a key-logger is not thin if the source is not revealed.

    Thanks again and I'll try that out.

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  2. If you yourself don't read the source, for all you know, it could be exporting your keystrokes to some server in Russia. I don't see how being "open source" alone can make it safe. It's still a keylogger.

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  3. Being open source makes it easier to see if there's something wrong with a program. You wouldn't open source a keylogger in disguise, would you?

    You could also install a firewall and realize the program doesn't need an internet connection.

    The program only stores a list of words anyway, not full texts. It also ignores passwords.

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  4. This isn't as good as I expected. With some improvements, it can be a good candidate. Now, it's still very rudimentary.

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  5. I wrote about it because I like the idea. The interface is not very user-friendly and if you don't configure it properly, you'll find it annoying.

    ReplyDelete

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