I've been playing around with Visual Basic programming lately,or vb.net or whatever it's called these days.  It's certainly been an interesting experience.  For the last few years, almost all the programming that I've done is server side programming with PHP. I needed to create something to run on my little home computer though, so I put myself on a learning spree with Visual basic earlier this year.

Visual basic is very nice with its windows design features but yikes, it's much more finickity than PHP.  Lots of declaring variables and variable types, not to mention unexpected runtime errors like the dreaded "index out of bounds" messages.

Anyway, during my little learning spree I made a neat little word counter program.  I've been using it quite a bit myself since then, mainly to count how many words are in web pages that I write.  Personally I've found it very useful so I thought I'd share my humble little creation with the world.  

It's really very accurate when calculating the number of words in a document. Some word counters can get very confused with double spaces between words and with paragraphs and extra white space like tabs.  The Springfrog Word Counter is smarter than the average counter though, and doesn't get put off by stuff like this.

The other disadvantage, particularly of some online word counters is their slowness. The Springfrog Word Counter, on the other hand, is super fast. I've just tested it on a document of 1186550 words and it took less than 2 seconds on my computer which has a Pentium E220 dual core 2.40Ghz processor.  Yes, that's over a million words counted in much less time than it takes to verbally say just one word  - supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

I love computers - just think how long it would have taken a human to do that!

Here's a screenshot of the Springfrog word counter in action.  You can either type directly into the counter or copy and paste text in.  It can be used for essays, papers you are writing or even to count the number of words in a whole book that you may be writing.  In the picture below I've pasted in the text of H.G. Wells' book, The First Men in The Moon.  When you want to check how many words are in your document, just click the Count Number of Words button and a little information box will pop up to tell you how many words are in your document.  I use WindowBlinds on my computer by the way to skin the way some things look, so you may find that when you run the program on your PC the grab bar and scrollbar appear a bit different to the screenshot below.  

Screenshot of the Springfrog Word Counter