Where I’d like to see AtD go…
I often get emails from folks asking for support for different platforms. I love to help folks and I’m very interested in solving a problem. I don’t have the expertise in all the platforms folks want AtD to support. Since it’s my occupation, I plan to keep improving AtD as a service, but here is my wish list of places where I’d like to see AtD wind up:
Wikipedia
I’d like to meet Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. First because I love Wikipedia and it tickles me pink that so much knowledge is available at my finger tips. I’m from the last generation to grow up with hard bound encyclopedias in my home.
Second, because I’d love to explore how After the Deadline could help Wikipedia. AtD could help raise the quality of writing there.
Since the service will be open source there won’t be an IP cost necessarily. The only barriers are AtD support in the MediaWiki software and server side costs. Fortunately I’ve learned a lot about scaling AtD from working with WordPress.com and given a number of edits/hour and server specs, I could come up with a good guess about how much horsepower is really needed.
I’d love to write the MediaWiki plugin myself but unfortunately I’m so caught up trying to improve the core AtD product that this is beyond my own scope. If anyone chooses to pick this project up, let me know, I’ll help in any way I can.
Online Office Suites and Content Management Systems
There are a lot of people cutting and pasting from Word to their content management systems. There are many web applications either taking over the word processor completely or for niche tasks. For this shift to really happen these providers need to offer proofreading tools that match what the user would get in their word processor. None of us are supposed to depend on automated tools but a lot of us do.
Abiword, KWord, OpenOffice, and Scribus
It’s a tough sell to say a technology like AtD belongs in a desktop word processor. I say this because AtD consumes boatloads of memory. I could adopt it to keep limited amounts of data in memory and swap necessary stuff from the disk. If there isn’t a form of AtD suitable for plugging into these applications, I hope someone clones the project and adapts it to these projects. If someone chooses to port AtD to C, let me know, I’ll probably give a little on my own time and will gladly answer questions.
After the Deadline 
One request: Firefox.
I wonder if there is some way to automatically detect the ‘adopt’ instead of ‘adapt’ error in the last paragraph. Perhaps by tracking some sort of ‘words used by user’ statitics and flagging seldom used words with a more common alternative.
AtD uses a statistical model to differentiate between words. Some words are hard to catch this way. When that happens I use a rule-based approach.