[tkmd]

Believe it or not I just started to use auto correct in MS Word - I LOVE that I can start to type a a sentence and it automatically capitalizes the first letter and will auto correct words like "dvd" to "DVD". Is there a plug in to do this in native mac apps like mail and safari? I really don't want to go back to using entourage...

[Mithras]

You might try one of the following:
Grammarian PRO X
TextExpander: Customizable Typing Utility Saves Time!
Amendment
TypeIt4MeFeatures

TextExpander is probably the one I would go for -- Grammarian Pro is a wee bit expensive at $40, and apparently Amendment doesn't support Mail.app at the moment.

[JKT]

Long time user of TypeIt4Me and Word's autocomplete feature is a complete rip-off of the app, only done much, much worse. The OS X version of TypeIt4Me has only recently got to and surpassed the level that it used to be at in OS 9 and earlier days (you can include images and formatting in the completed text now which is how it has surpassed the older versions).

FWIW, with the auto-expansion apps like TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, you can have it input complete paragraphs of text in response to a trigger, so if you want your address put into a letter already formatted, you can input e.g. myadd to do just that. Another example, I have ysp set up to input "Yours sincerely," with an image of my signature appended so I can sign off letters in any text editing app with ease.

Personally, I prefer TypeIt4Me over TextExpander because it has more "triggers" than TE, which only activated expansion following a spacebar press the last time I used it (note, triggers are characters that will cause expansion when typed. TypeIt4Me will trigger on space and almost all punctuation marks and you can pick and chose which you want to use for the purpose).

[JKT]

Incidentally, does anyone know of an equivalent to TypeIt4Me/TextExpander for Windows??

[tkmd]

I'm looking at these programs and it seems that none auto capitalize after a sentence - that would be godsend. Another issue is that they don't auto-correct (if I am reading their web page correctly). The user has to manually put a misspelled word into it for the program to trigger an autocorrect.

[JKT]

Yes, you do need to input mis-spellings, but that is actually not really any different to MS Word. Word, just comes with some common mis-spellings already added. The point is that these programmes aren't just auto-correction - they are also auto-input tools that let you add text automatically on the basis of your own shortcuts. E.g. wk for me is expanded to WebKit whenever I input it.

TypeIt4Me doesn't do auto-capitilisation of sentences but, fwiw, auto-correction and auto-capitilisation are not the same feature in Word (they are two distinct settings).