DreamCatcher is a desktop application for spellchecking websites. It has been an instant hit since I released it in the middle of August 2005. It was my first foray back into developing Cocoa applications for end users since completing my Computer Science degree. A good overview of DreamCatcher's capabilities and mode of operation is available at the DreamCatcher web site

Here are excerpts from some of the comments I have received about DreamCatcher in letters that users have sent me:

• Dreamcatcher is FANTASTIC!!!
  Thank you very very much for making such an incredibly useful, quick, unusual, and amazing tool.
  
  You rock!!!
• Wow! Dreamcatcher is a very nice program. Very nice implementation for a 1.0 product.
• I'll be recommending DC [DreamCatcher] to pretty much anyone who does web pages.
• Thanks for the application. I've wanted something like this for years.
• I just read about DreamCatcher on MacInTouch and downloaded it. What a lovely, simple piece of software! To quote a current British catch-phrase, 'it does exactly what it says on the tin' - no more, no less. Well done!
  
  I was sceptical about it when I first read about it, because I thought it would only work on static HTML pages, and I do all my web work in PHP these days. But no - it works perfectly on the sites I develop, served from my local testbed server (on my main G5). Marvellous!
  
  BTW, I /very/ rarely do this - just fire off an email to congratulate a software author. :-)
• Just a note to thank you for a product that is incredibly useful to me...we developed a low end content management system and have always wanted to do a bulk spell check of the sites that we develop.
  
  DreamCatcher just works great!
  
  Great idea, great product, slick implementation.
  
  My hat is off to you.
• Nice job! Very clean and easy to use.

As you can see, people love DreamCatcher. It also was highlighted as one of the "newest, hottest products for your Mac." on Apple's Macintosh Products Guide . I didn't even submit DreamCatcher to the Macintosh Products Guide, but I can only assume that somebody at Apple found it and decided to highlight it. In fact, I made no effort to promote DreamCatcher, I only submitted it to macupdate.com in the hope that it would be useful to somebody else.

It is also worth noting that for an application like DreamCatcher that has to work with a broad range of web sites and web servers, it simply wasn't possible to test every real world circumstance myself. Therefore the public release of DreamCatcher has been great for improving it because users have written in to me with bug reports and suggestions, many of which I have iteratively incorporated into successive DreamCatcher releases. For instance, everything in the preferences panel in DreamCatcher as well as many other niceties are the direct result of user suggestions.

Links

DreamCatcher Website

Downloads

DreamCatcher application (requires Mac OS 10.4)

DreamCatcher source code

DreamCatcher URL entry box (initial screen in DreamCatcher)

DreamCatcher Results screen

DreamCatcher progress screen

DreamCatcher preferences

DreamCatcher export screen

DreamCatcher even includes complete on-line documentation