Hot Connect

"Our Text Windows Are One..."

Hot Connect is Jarte's equivalent of the Vulcan mind meld. It connects Jarte to any other program's text window allowing instant transfer of text between the two windows. The connection makes it easy and convenient to use Jarte to write and spell check text for the other program. Hot Connect can be used for writing and spell checking e-mails, blog entries, newsgroup posts, or any other writing task you normally do in another program or in your web browser.

Hot Connect can also be used for reading articles from your web browser without any of the ads.

An Example of Hot Connect in Action

Microsoft's Outlook Express e-mail program does not have its own spell checker†. Before Hot Connect, if you were writing an e-mail with Outlook Express and wanted to spell check it with Jarte you could copy the e-mail text to the clipboard, paste the text into Jarte, run Jarte's spell checker, copy the corrected text to the clipboard, switch back to Outlook Express, clear the e-mail's existing text, and then paste the spell corrected text into the e-mail. But, that's a lot of steps.

Hot Connect makes this task much easier. Press Jarte's Hot Connect hot key (Alt+F7 by default) while writing an e-mail in Outlook Express. The e-mail's text automatically appears in Jarte under a special "Hot Connect" tab. Make any necessary spelling corrections or edits and then save the text. The Save action switches back to the Outlook Express e-mail and automatically replaces its text with the corrected text from Jarte.

You can also hot connect to an empty e-mail window, write the e-mail from scratch in Jarte, and then Save to instantly transfer the text to the e-mail window.

†Outlook Express will use Microsoft Word's spell checker if Word is installed.

Using Hot Connect

Starting Hot Connect

First, ensure Hot Connect is enabled in the Hot Connect Options window.

Hot Connect is initiated by pressing the Alt+F7 hot key while the computer's focus is in the text window to be connected to Jarte. The hot key can be changed in the Hot Connect Options window. Jarte must already be running when you press the hot key. If there is any text in the text window being connected then it will be transferred to a new Jarte document pane with the tab name "Hot Connect".

Spell checking of the connected window's text can be set to begin automatically when the text appears in Jarte. Automatic spell checking is controlled in the Hot Connect Options window.

Saving Changes

When the writing or spell checking of text in Jarte has been completed the updated text is transferred back to the hot connected window by performing a Save (e.g., click the Save button in the Status Bar). Jarte replaces the hot connected window's existing text with the updated text and returns focus to that window.

Transferring Partial Text

If text is highlighted in the text window to be hot connected then Hot Connect will only transfer the highlighted text to Jarte. When edit changes are saved they will replace only the highlighted text in the hot connected window, assuming the window's text is still highlighted. For example, you can highlight a single word in a text window and press Alt+F7 to spell check the word in Jarte. You can then correct the word's spelling and Save which replaces the highlighted word in the hot connected window with the corrected spelling.

Use Hot Connect for Reading and Printing

How many times have you read an article on the web that was formatted into a narrow column with flashing ads running down both sides of the article? Or, have you ever wanted to print an article without any of the surrounding ads? Hot Connect can solve those problems: Highlight the article's text in your web browser and then press Alt+F7. The article will then appear in Jarte, ready for reading and printing, without any of the ads.

Caveats