Mac OS X comes with built-in spell checking for many applications, but why stop there? Now you can have an integrated thesaurus as well. With Nisus Thesaurus you get a fast electronic thesaurus that automatically integrates with any service aware application including Nisus Writer Express, Mail, TextEdit, Safari, and more.
Using Thesaurus is easy. Just select the word in your favorite application and choose “Nisus Thesaurus” from the “Services” sub-menu. When you select a word in Nisus Thesaurus, the synonyms for that word will be shown right next to it in the Word Browser. When you lookup a word in Nisus Thesaurus, it will show you related words in six catagories.
Nisus Thesaurus is available as a free download. More info and download link here.
Whee! More free stuff!
Gotta love Services.
I don’t want to knock it, but why would you need a thesaurus in Safari?
I’ll download it anyway, another cool free ap
Note that although the software is free, the license agreement requires you to authorize Nisus to send you up to two emails per month “informing you of other products and specials”.
I hesitate to say that Nisus Thesaurus is not “freeware” but “spamware”, because that might suggest Nisus were spammers. They aren’t, and there’s nothing incorrect about what they’re doing – they are quite correctly asking your permission before mailing you. But agreeing to get mail from them is the hidden ‘price’ of the software.
Theoretically, you could accept their terms and then simply filter their mail, but then you would probably be breaking your half of the agreement, at least in spirit (strictly, all they require is that you “do not and will not object to receiving” mail, but their intention is clearly for you to read the mail, rather than dumping it unread).
If the good folks at Nisus wanted us to agree to “read” their email, then that’s what they should include in their agreement, otherwise, the only thing I’d apparently be obligated to do is “receive” it. Once it enters my inbox, I will have fulfilled my “half of the agreement” as stated and I can then do whatever I wish with it, including have Mail move it automatically to the trash without being read. Simple enough.
Nice and useful – remember to quit each app to update its Services menu.