Then Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was introduced and included a system-wide dictionary: teach it the word “Hisham” in Mail, for example, and all the other Mac programs now knew that Hisham is not a mistake (though some friends might disagree!)

I thought that Firefox was the only Mac app to still provide its own dictionary instead of taking advantage of the Mac’s built-in one, but I found a worse app this week: it neither uses the built-in one nor provides its own.

The developers suggest that you “Take the time to copy edit your work so that you can avoid embarrassing typos…”:

In essence, you need to type your text in another app, then copy and paste it.

And not just to have your work spell-checked: this app’s edit field is not resizable — a very un-Mac experience.

You don’t h ave to type long before it becomes

a chore.

Yes, you probably realized it by now: the guilty app is Apple’ s own iTune

s. iTunes has always had two faces.

The nice, Mac-like one is fast and feels, well, like a Mac.

The bad face is the iTunes store part of the program that’s built using WebKit.

But this hardly excuses iTunes: Safari too uses WebKit but feels a lot zippier, and yes, supports the built-in dictionary.