Addictive Software's Addict may sound like a tool for managing your heroin habit, but it's actually a set of spell check and thesaurus tools you can plug into your Delphi (version 4 or greater) or C++ Builder (version 4 or greater) applications.

Addict 3.4.3 is available for download and purchase at the company's Web site at $199 for a single-user license. The installation detects and installs for available platforms, in my case both the Borland Delphi Studio 2005 and the non-.NET-based Delphi 7. On the next startup, the controls are there and ready to use. (The Addict help notes that it will not integrate into BDS 2005 yet, but it didn't seem to integrate into Delphi 7's Help, either.)

First Impressions

If you've ever programmed with really professional components (as Delphi users are accustomed to), you're familiar with the sense of nigh-giddiness that comes from clicking on a component, placing it on your form, and, bam! instantly giving your application a top-flight feature.

By dropping two components on to your form, and pointing them at the dictionary you want to use, you can provide your applications with a auto-correcting, instant-error-checking (complete-with-red-jagged-underline), correction-suggesting memo edit.

And, once you do that, you may find it's difficult to stop. These tools are — well, they really are addictive. I started playing with them, adding them here and there. If there's anything better than a tool that's fun to use, I don't know what it is.

However, there's a lot more to a good tool than being easy and fun to use (though those are a good place to start). As fun as the dictionary/spell-checker was, I wanted to check out the thesaurus. I also wanted to see how hard it would be to link the checker into an existing control. Could you work the checker into a simple text edit? How about a grid?

But before we start down that road, we should look at one more important area of basic use.