Grant Skinner first showed me his components for spell checking in Flex, Flash, and AIR at MAX Chicago. I was interested in them because they were being used in Buzzword (which Adobe recently acquired), and because I’m always interested in checking out Grant’s latest work. I also wanted to see them because they were built partly as a result of a challenge that the AIR team gave Grant: the first versions of his spell check engine used server side spell checking, and we challenged him to make it work client-side so it could be used offline with AIR applications.

The thing that really stood out for me after looking the components over is how polished the whole product is. The code is very slick and optimized, the API looks really robust, the documentation is complete, and the whole package is really well organized. Grant also made it really simple to implement: drag a component onto a textfield or component in Flash to add spell checking, or add a simple tag in Flex. The Flash community would really benefit if there was a wide variety of professional components like these.

This latest update improves Flex integration, and makes it behave more like spell checking in Word or Pages.

Check out the SPL product page for more info, and demos of the components in action.

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