Apple's Snow Leopard to offer text auto-correction

[AppleInsider]

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.

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.'

The features could presumably be extended to all applications that will run on Snow Leopard.

Separately, the screenshots reveal that several Apple-authored applications will see major version number upgrades as a result of Cocoa enhancements and previously announced Exchange support. These include Mail 4.0, AddressBook 5.0, Migration Assistant 2.0, iChat 5.0, and Image Capture 6.0.

The latter is said to have seen a complete interface overhaul with several new features. More subtle application revisions will reportedly include Spaces 1.1, Time Machine 1.1, and iSync 3.1.

Screenshots show that Snow Leopard's Cocoa Finder, listed as version 10.6 (with DS version 1.5), includes options to run individual applications in 32 Bit mode. The Apple logo and menubar reportedly turn a lighter color when applications are run in 64 bit mode.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[Hattig]

It'd be nice to actually see the screenshots.

[BB Sting]

Well, as long as they give us the option to turn the auto-correction off. Believe it or not, but sometimes people really do prefer to type in double negatives and/or slang, as well as alternate spellings that aren't found in the dictionary. Example: mabe, ain't, cuz, etc. And don't forget abbreviations, lol, imao, ttyl, brb, u2, pos,

[JoeDRC]

Originally Posted by BB Sting

Well, as long as they give us the option to turn the auto-correction off. Believe it or not, but sometimes people really do prefer to type in double negatives and/or slang, as well as alternate spellings that aren't found in the dictionary. Example: mabe, ain't, cuz, etc.

i also hope they offer a proper english(british)

[dsjander]

and hopfully this time Apple will allow the user to turn this option off, unlike in the iPhone.

[Virgil-TB2]

Originally Posted by BB Sting

... sometimes people really do prefer to type in double negatives and/or slang, as well as alternate spellings ...

You're misunderstanding this a bit. It's not like Microsoft's autocorrect or Word's grammar mangling, it's just about spelling and word substitution.

You can add all those mis-spellings you quoted into the dictionary the first time you use them and never have to turn it off or worry about it again.

[abrooks]

Originally Posted by Hattig

It'd be nice to actually see the screenshots.

Second that.

[nagromme]

I wonder if "text replacement" means you can create a user-defined list of shorthand: like typing 'mas' and hitting the space bar could enter 'Massachusetts.' You could use that to quickly type long names or technical terms in your field... or to convert habitual txt-speak into real English

[MartiNZ]

Yeah it needs to be customisable. If it is in preparation for touch control like the iPhone's auto-correct, it could be quite a pain.

[_ alliance _]

I hate that "feature." I am constantly correcting the auto-correction, taking a ridiculous amount of time to type a simple street address or name in my notes.

[nagromme]

Originally Posted by _ alliance _

I hate that "feature." I am constantly correcting the auto-correction, taking a ridiculous amount of time to type a simple street address or name in my notes.

You probably already know, but you can tap the auto-correction bubble to cancel it, saving you from having to edit it to be what you want.

I find I almost NEVER cancel the auto-correction. It's right 99.9% of the time, and a huge time-saver. But I can imagine that during the entry of lots of proper nouns you'd want to turn off the auto-correction entirely.

[kerryb]

All the hand wringing about Snow being "just an under the hood bug fix" without any new features seems ridiculous now. We are probably a year away from this update's release and it already appears to offer more than first thought. It may not offer 300 new features like Leopard but refinement of the GUI, speed, and probably a merging of iPHone technologies will make this a very exciting version of Mac

[Inkling]

These new features are either a nuisance (autocorrect) or trivial (m-dashes). The text editing features that Snow Leopard actually needs include these:

* Styled text much like you will find any good word processor. Styled text lets you create and name paragraph and text styles that can be applied to text. Change the style definition and all the text assigned that style changes. And exported text should include the style tags. The lack of true text styles is why TextEdit looks and functions like a clone of WordStar from the early 1980s complete with a ruler bar.

* Tabbed text to tables. Another feature any word processor worth its salt has, but that's lacking in OS X. The only tables OS X will let you create are empty ones into which you can manually insert text. You can't take a block of tabbed text from some source and convert it into a table.

*Text to speech starting anywhere. Text=to-speech is a good proofing tool. But OS X only lets you read from the start of a document or an entire blocked text. That makes it a pain to use. Text to speech should be able to start where the cursor is and read until the user says stop, for example to correct an error. And that's great for people with vision problems too.

Add these features and they'd soon be appearing in dozens of text applications, giving people a good reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Leave them out and for many Snow Leopard will be a yawner. Text applications in OS X will continue to be over 20 years out of date.

[webfrasse]

....I want turn OFF. So ironic....

I also turn this off in Word etc where it's been available for years and years.

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

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.

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.'

The features could presumably be extended to all applications that will run on Snow Leopard.

Separately, the screenshots reveal that several Apple-authored applications will see major version number upgrades as a result of Cocoa enhancements and previously announced Exchange support. These include Mail 4.0, AddressBook 5.0, Migration Assistant 2.0, iChat 5.0, and Image Capture 6.0.

The latter is said to have seen a complete interface overhaul with several new features. More subtle application revisions will reportedly include Spaces 1.1, Time Machine 1.1, and iSync 3.1.

Screenshots show that Snow Leopard's Cocoa Finder, listed as version 10.6 (with DS version 1.5), includes options to run individual applications in 32 Bit mode. The Apple logo and menubar reportedly turn a lighter color when applications are run in 64 bit mode.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[GMHut]

I just hope it offers proper English (American) ;-)

Seriously Brits,

Why the hell did you guys stick with this crazy F'd up spelling structure. I mean common, if it weren't possible to spell things like the "f" sound with "augh" and "ph" and equally ridiculous things and have it still be "proper" English we probably wouldn't need auto-correct spelling features ;-)

[foobar]

You know what this could mean? All-touch virtual keyboard like the old Fingerworks keyboards! They had auto-correction to counter the lack of physical buttons. Since Apple bought them, I was hoping they would bring those to the mainstream. The gestures are already there.

[Sladuuch]

[ltcommander.data]

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

The Apple logo and menubar reportedly turn a lighter color when applications are run in 64 bit mode.

Is that really necessary? Hopefully it doesn't create a fuss like Leopard's transparent menu bar all over again.

[BB Sting]

Originally Posted by GMHut

I just hope it offers proper English (American) ;-)

Seriously Brits,

Why the hell did you guys stick with this crazy F'd up spelling structure. I mean common, if it weren't possible to spell things like the "f" sound with "augh" and "ph" and equally ridiculous things and have it still be "proper" English we probably wouldn't need auto-correct spelling features ;-)

I actually think the American way of spelling is quite flawed. They took perfectly good words, like centre, or cheque, and gave them totally bizarre spellings, center, and check, when their was nothing at all wrong with the original way of spelling them. And if every word looked just how it sounded, we would have a very confused language indeed. Imagine if one was spelled won, or if two was spelled too.

[BB Sting]

okay, you want a screen shot, you got one

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/...f48f8116_o.png

[Ninja_Monkey]

Originally Posted by GMHut

I just hope it offers proper English (American) ;-)

Seriously Brits,

Why the hell did you guys stick with this crazy F'd up spelling structure. I mean common, if it weren't possible to spell things like the "f" sound with "augh" and "ph" and equally ridiculous things and have it still be "proper" English we probably wouldn't need auto-correct spelling features ;-)

Perhaps it's the same reason Americans didn't choose to adopt the metric system.

Originally Posted by BB Sting

I actually think the American way of spelling is quite flawed. They took perfectly good words, like centre, or cheque, and gave them totally bizarre spellings, center, and check, when their was nothing at all wrong with the original way of spelling them. And if every word looked just how it sounded, we would have a very confused language indeed. Imagine if one was spelled won, or if two was spelled too.

The American system of spelling makes more sense. Words like catergorize, z instead of an s, are spelt like there pronounced. English though is a stupid language. No one letter has the same sound corresponding to it. Look at the 'a' in the following words. Father, dad, dame, call, village, many. There are six different ways of pronouncing 'a'

[allblue]

Originally Posted by Ninja_Monkey

The American system of spelling makes more sense. Words like catergorize, z instead of an s, are spelt like there pronounced. English though is a stupid language. No one letter has the same sound corresponding to it. Look at the 'a' in the following words. Father, dad, dame, call, village, many. There are six different ways of pronouncing 'a'

English is such a hybrid language that it is not at all phonetic. 'Center' may be more phonetic than 'centre', but the -re ending is a legacy of French elements in the language. To arbitrarily change some words, as happened in post-independence America, without overhauling and standardising the whole caboodle doesn't make a lot of sense either.

You did not pick a very good example with 'categorise'. How do you pronounce 'rise'? My favourite confuse-a-foreigner-trying-to-learn-English anomaly is the suffix '-ough'. Four letters, six (count 'em) different pronunciations:

off as in cough
uff as in rough
ow as in bough
oh as in though
oo as in through
uh as in thorough

Still, at least verbs are easy and nouns are not gender specific!

[_ alliance _]

Originally Posted by nagromme

You probably already know, but you can tap the auto-correction bubble to cancel it, saving you from having to edit it to be what you want.

I find I almost NEVER cancel the auto-correction. It's right 99.9% of the time, and a huge time-saver. But I can imagine that during the entry of lots of proper nouns you'd want to turn off the auto-correction entirely.

Yep. So that's another thing I have to do each time. Pain in the ass. And sometimes I am not looking at the word, but rather at the keys, thus missing that it had just "corrected" the word for me. So...I get to backspace the entire word and start over again. Again, pain in the ass.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by nagromme

I wonder if "text replacement" means you can create a user-defined list of shorthand: like typing 'mas' and hitting the space bar could enter 'Massachusetts.' You could use that to quickly type long names or technical terms in your field... or to convert habitual txt-speak into real English

I think people call that feature TextExpander. It's third party, but it works great.

Originally Posted by nagromme

You probably already know, but you can tap the auto-correction bubble to cancel it, saving you from having to edit it to be what you want.

I find I almost NEVER cancel the auto-correction. It's right 99.9% of the time, and a huge time-saver. But I can imagine that during the entry of lots of proper nouns you'd want to turn off the auto-correction entirely.

That's nice, but your experience doesn't help me at all, my experience is the exact opposite. As far as I can tell, it's not self-learning, not extendable and it has too limited of a stock vocabulary. I don't want it and wish I can just turn it off without having to edit some oddball plist somewhere. Having to tap the bubble really takes me out of rhythm.

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by Hattig

It'd be nice to actually see the screenshots.

Well, I was kind of thinking that. Those links were like April fools jokes.

Auto-correction.

Mac touch FTW?

[nospamboz]

Originally Posted by allblue

My favourite confuse-a-foreigner-trying-to-learn-English anomaly is the suffix '-ough'. Four letters, six (count 'em) different pronunciations

You forgot "hiccough".

[Ninja_Monkey]

Originally Posted by allblue

English is such a hybrid language that it is not at all phonetic. 'Center' may be more phonetic than 'centre', but the -re ending is a legacy of French elements in the language. To arbitrarily change some words, as happened in post-independence America, without overhauling and standardising the whole caboodle doesn't make a lot of sense either.

You did not pick a very good example with 'categorise'. How do you pronounce 'rise'? My favourite confuse-a-foreigner-trying-to-learn-English anomaly is the suffix '-ough'. Four letters, six (count 'em) different pronunciations:

off as in cough
uff as in rough
ow as in bough
oh as in though
oo as in through
uh as in thorough

Still, at least verbs are easy and nouns are not gender specific!

The point I was trying to make with catergorise is the US spelling is spelt phonetically correct. ie Z as in zoolander where as in British english it's an s as in snake. You don't say cat-er-gor-size. So in this case the US spelling just makes more sense.

You can also have the opposite problem with your example too. You have words with the sme spelling at the end but different vowels. Where as the words

to
too
two
through
threw
clue
shoe

have the same vowel at the end but are spelt differently.

Other problems with the spelling of english.
Sometimes a combination of letters represents a single sound. 'sh' for example
Or one letter represents two sounds. ie x in box. Box ends in a k then an s sound at the end of it. And silent letters. gnaw, knife, debt, island.

[SpamSandwich]

Apple needs to make the equivalent of a "Genius" spelling and grammar checker. One that constantly updates over the web and seeks out the most acceptable corrections.

[kriskl]

You have missed one point with this news!!

I am 99% certain, the main reason for Apple to include iphone like typing in Leopard is this long awaited Apple Tablet or whatever you want to call it!
great, the time is near

[allblue]

Originally Posted by nospamboz

You forgot "hiccough".

Of course! Thanks!

Originally Posted by Ninja_Monkey

You can also have the opposite problem with your example too. You have words with the sme spelling at the end but different vowels. Where as the words

to
too
two
through
threw
clue
shoe

have the same vowel at the end but are spelt differently.

Not forgetting 'you'!

[Ninja_Monkey]

Originally Posted by allblue

Of course! Thanks!



Not forgetting 'you'!

Of course, how foolish of me.

[jragosta]

Originally Posted by allblue

English is such a hybrid language that it is not at all phonetic. 'Center' may be more phonetic than 'centre', but the -re ending is a legacy of French elements in the language.

Which is yet one more reason to prefer 'center' over 'centre'.

[Galley]

Why English is hard to learn

[allblue]

Hi Ninja!

What you see as a flaw this guy sees as a strength. From the BBC site today:

"Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels - and it means "beautiful thinking". It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bok's book of fiction in which each chapter uses only one vowel.

Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."

Full story here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today...00/7697762.stm

PS Apologies for turning this thread into linguistic larrikinism...

[mstone]

Originally Posted by JeffDM

I don't want it and wish I can just turn it off without having to edit some oddball plist somewhere. Having to tap the bubble really takes me out of rhythm.

I doubt it will work the same way on Mac as it currently does on an iPhone. Typists who don't even look at the screen when they are entering text would find it quite annoying - for example reading from a printed or handwritten document that you are retyping. You wouldn't even know that the words were being 'corrected' for you every time you hit the space bar.

The iPhone is pretty much a hunt and peck style of typing so it is more obvious that the words are being corrected and helps speed up the otherwise tedious input method, but I still find it annoying. I prefer the way it currently works on Mac - just underline them in red. Text auto-correction seems so Microsoft-like. If I want help I'd rather just go to the help menu. I generally dislike anything that is supposed to be automatic.

[Gon]

The very first Snow Leopard feature I hear of is a negative one? Way to go.

[Gon]

Originally Posted by Inkling

These new features are either a nuisance (autocorrect) or trivial (m-dashes). The text editing features that Snow Leopard actually needs include these:

* Styled text much like you will find any good word processor. Styled text lets you create and name paragraph and text styles that can be applied to text. Change the style definition and all the text assigned that style changes. And exported text should include the style tags. The lack of true text styles is why TextEdit looks and functions like a clone of WordStar from the early 1980s complete with a ruler bar.

If the name is to be trusted, TextEdit is primarily a text editor. That's totally different from a word processor.

If anything, I think Apple should strip all the rich text viewing/editing out of TextEdit. Being loaded with the rich text features makes it a clumsy, confused, bad-UI text editor. Those features rightly belong in a separate app. Microsoft has had this thing right since Windows 3.0 (Notepad/Write).

The separate RTF app would certainly be improved with addition of styles and tables, but if you are a heavy enough user to bother with those, you are *very* fast approaching a point where you should just grab a real word processor from Apple/Redlex/Microsoft/OpenOffice.org/Abisource/etc. Why would Apple eat its own sales? Should operating systems come with everything and the kitchen sink?

Maybe the solution would be for Apple to ship Pages in its default software package alongside iLife. I imagine Keynote and Numbers, as well as Pages upgrades, would still sell iWork to most people who currently buy it.

[Ninja_Monkey]

Hello allblue,

That was perhaps the most bizarre thing I've ever read. I just think there is a flaw in the way English is written. The same letters can correspond to different vowels. Two letters grouped together make one sound 'sh'.

Languages that make more sense in the way their written, for me at least, are languages like Spanish or Turkish. There easier to learn. Each letter has it's own sound and it doesn't change. Words are pronounced the way their written. Simple.

[mdriftmeyer]

Originally Posted by Gon

If the name is to be trusted, TextEdit is primarily a text editor. That's totally different from a word processor.

If anything, I think Apple should strip all the rich text viewing/editing out of TextEdit. Being loaded with the rich text features makes it a clumsy, confused, bad-UI text editor. Those features rightly belong in a separate app. Microsoft has had this thing right since Windows 3.0 (Notepad/Write).

The separate RTF app would certainly be improved with addition of styles and tables, but if you are a heavy enough user to bother with those, you are *very* fast approaching a point where you should just grab a real word processor from Apple/Redlex/Microsoft/OpenOffice.org/Abisource/etc. Why would Apple eat its own sales? Should operating systems come with everything and the kitchen sink?

Maybe the solution would be for Apple to ship Pages in its default software package alongside iLife. I imagine Keynote and Numbers, as well as Pages upgrades, would still sell iWork to most people who currently buy it.

Horses***! TextEdit.app is an application that is a gateway for Development. It was developed as an Openstep replacement to Edit.app by Mike Ferris and Ali Ozer of AppKit.

Rich Text has been a baseline of NeXT from it's inception. Even the most basic of applications can easily get Rich Text [RTF/RTFD] built-in with practically NO CODE.

Stick with Notepad if that's what turns your crank. The developer extensions you can add to TextEdit.app allow it to be an HTML TextEditor, or not.

The Application is a basic Rich Text Editor that was used with NeXTMail.app in a manner that it only take a minute amount of code to provide a rich text editor to then be leveraged inside a MIME complaint Rich Text enabled Mail Client.

[enzomedici]

The spell correction on the iPhone is a fuckin' disaster. You can't turn it off and it works backwards anyway. It should let me type as I want to and if I want to accept the spelling change, then I should have to tap the pop up bubble to accept the change. Now it decides for me if I just keep typing. I know what the fuck I want to type and I don't need that piece of shit spell correction changing shit around on me.