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White Smoke

 This is my first post in English. With a little help of White Smoke, I am now able to write in English, too :-).

When I found White Smoke web page it looked like ideal solution for me. But in practice, there is a difference between a theory and practice…

What is White Smoke? White Smoke is a little app that checks your grammar, spelling, and the most important one, your writing style. So, even mediocre English writers can now write good posts in English. At least, in theory…

How it improves my English skills, and how it works?

First of all, there is no trial version of the product. You need to pay full price to be able to download installation file. Second, this app employs very strange idea in terms of its internal working mechanism. For example, it connects to remote server and then sends your text over the Internet. Third, besides it has "Windows Vista Certified" Logo on its page, it barely works on Vista. I am wondering how it passed all the required tests for certification. In FAQ on their support page, they recommend you to turn off UAC on Vista to make it works. This situation gets much more complicated if you have Office 2007 installed. After one hour of research on the Internet and White smoke FAQ page, after turning off UAC, and after one reinstall I finally made it work on my machine. But now it becomes biggest possible disappointment. THIS APP HAS ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE. Let's see why…

If you are using MS Word or Outlook, you can call White Smoke "Enrich" directly from the editor. Or it should work in that way. In Word 2007 I have to select entire text and then hit White Smoke button, placed on Add-In tab, just to call the app. If you try to commit some of accepted suggestions back to the Word, it will mess everything up. In other, unsupported, apps you have to hit F2 to call White Smoke. As I said, White Smoke then sends your text over the Internet to analyze it (someone mentioned privacy?!). Then you may select type of your document. Business, legal, medical, etc… What were results?

I used "creative writing" style. In return it has just few questionable suggestions, half of them obviously wrong. There is no mention of some advanced AI behavior. All spelling and most of the grammar errors are already caught by Word spell checker. If you add that you have to disable UAC and leave your machine vulnerable to possible attacks, value of this app is very poor. Aside from, my bank account is "short" for some hundred bucks. I am seriously thinking about getting my money back.

In one sentence: Great idea, terrible implementation.

PS: White Smoke is responsible of all errors not corrected in this text. It's also responsible for my poor EnglishJ