“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.