“Modern text-handling technologies made popular on Apple’s iPhone should turn up on the Mac next year as part of the company’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release,” Sam Oliver reports for AppleInsider.
MacDailyNews Note: iPhone analyzes keystrokes to suggest words as you type. It does this by employing complex mathematics to track the pattern of letters you type and match them to the pattern of other common words. iPhone uses a complete English dictionary to correct text, and it learns the words you type most often — including proper names and information from your contacts list. Not only does iPhone “learn” and get better with time, it also speeds up typing by suggesting common contractions such as “can’t,” “don’t,” or “let’s.” And it lets you insert special characters and accents quickly: Just touch and hold a letter to see all of its possible forms. Slide your finger to the right one, and you’re done. In addition, iPhone also features sophisticated character recognition software that lets you draw a Chinese character with your finger and tap to choose the matching result.
Oliver continues, “Purported screenshots making the rounds from build 10A190 of the OS overhaul show that a new version of Apple’s TextEdit application will offer preferences for at least three new text handling operations.”
“The first, which is already a staple of the company’s iPhone interface, offers to correct spelling automatically as a user types. Another offers to automatically insert ‘smart dashes’ while a user types, while a third feature is simply titled ‘Text replacement,'” Oliver reports. “The features could presumably be extended to all applications.”
More in the full article here.
It’s fantastic if you are typing in english. Not so, if you attempt to switch to a deferent language.
OpenOffice for Mac does this and I really like it. You press return to accept their suggestion early, or just keep typing as usual and their suggestion disappears.
Great! I’m still typing with one hand due to a stroke that affected my left side. This will help speed up my typing while I work on getting back to typing with both hands.
Does that mean no cut and paste?
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I find the Spanish autocorrect on the iPhone to be very accurate.
So yea, it’s fantastic for other languages, too. Thanx.
TextEdit is truly an unsung hero of the Mac world.
I have had three different iPhones. On all of them, the text auto-complete function has been worse than useless. Most often, it makes completely idiotic suggestions unrelated to the actual characters typed. I would completely disable it if I could. Heaven help us all if this is the kind of “iPhone-like text handling” we get in Snow Leopard!
alansky,
To see the definition of “Operator Error” simply look in the nearest mirror.
iPhone’s text-handing capabilities are amazing when you’re not a moronic RIM / Windows Mobile / Google Android astroturfer.
@ Wandering Joe,
I was thinking the same thing. LOL
@Alansky,
Typing english but using the swedish dictionary is not going to work mate.
In german the “auto-correction” makes utterly nonsensical proposals most of the time which have no similarity to any german words — not even close! Among other things, it uses umlauts not just liberally but aggressively with no sense whatsoever.
But since the “words” it proposes are pure nonsensical gibberish most of the time anyway, the nonsensical umlauts don’t really hurt much in addition any more.
The consensus in Germany is that if Apple is incapable or unwilling to provide a working auto-correction, at the absolute least the damn thing needs a switch so we can at least kick it out and produce german text that’s actually decipherable.
Yes. It is that bad!
Can I opt out of this? I don’t want to constantly check the screen to see if it’s completed a word for me and hit the arrow to get to the end of it. Nor do I want a blizzard of constantly changing suggestions popping up at my cursor, disrupting my writing process by throwing unrelated words at me. I’ve already dealt with Pages’ similar feature and detest it.
Just make sure I can turn it off as it’s super annoying on iPhone when I’m not typing english. Remember, there so many other languages out there unsupported by iPhone.
The absolutely best part of any feature like this is the OFF-button. I sincerely hope it is included!!
You have missed one point with this news!!
I am 99% certain, the main reason for Apple to include typing in Leopard like in iPhone, is this long awaited Apple Tablet or whatever you want to call it!
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great, it’s near
I like the capability on the iPhone and have gotten used to it. What I have noticed though is that the phone/software doesn’t seem to want to “learn” curse words or expletives!
I would hope for SL that the capability can be turned off.
Not keen on this feature being included into Snow Leopard. On the iPhone, where typing is more difficult than a normal keyboard, this makes sense. However including it into the general OS X experience will only encourage people to become more lazy about learning to type properly.