RandolphUX of the Week

Let’s talk about iPhone autocorrect. I am a pretty mild-mannered guy. Last time I hit someone I was in 3rd grade, probably because my classmate Jimmy hit me harder than I hit him. However, sometimes I fantasize about being in a room alone with the person who designed the iOS autocorrect feature – just me and that person, a chair with some arm restraints, 10 bamboo shoots, and a small hammer. I am not proud of this fantasy, but, if y’all wanna join me, I will save you a few fingers.

Some software designer – for pronoun ease let’s assume it was a guy – in California sat in his cubicle, thrilled that he had this terrific job at Apple and had this amazingly fun task. “Ooh, wow. Watch this. Some poor big-thumbed soul enters ‘Good morninf,’ and I betcha he meant ‘Good morning,’ so I am gonna fix it for him. Woo hoo. I’ll be a hero. Look at all the time I’ll save our dear users.” OK, good idea, in theory.

And often it is a time saver.

I once worked for a software development manager at IBM who would say “Don’t try to be smart unless you can be smart all the time.” And if we loyally adhered to that strategy there would be NO autocorrect; there really might be SOME time when a user truly wishes to write “That was a real shut show.” But, you pays yer money and you takes yer chances. Let’s give it a try. Yes, about 99.999% of the time “morninf” was intended to be “morning.”

But then our developer goose overreached! One time – maybe it was late, and he was up against a deadline – he said, “Ya know, I’ll bet when someone enters ‘were’ that person really wanted to write ‘we’re.’” Really? You dumb shut! I’ll bet in the history of the English language “were” has been written about 100 times more often than “we’re.” Why would you EVER “correct” an actual English word? I mean, MAYBE if there is some way-low-frequency word that is close to a high-frequency word – ok, probably most of the time that someone keys in “fop” the intended word was “for.” But only in the most extreme cases should some guy in Cupertino think he knows what I intended, if I type in a real goddam English word.

And just don’t even get me started about inserting apostrophes before random word-final Ss.

Plus, if you correct me once, and I uncorrect it back to my original intent, whyTF would you correct me again? How many lines of code does it take to avoid getting into an autocorrect battle with me? “No, I am pretty sure you meant ‘shut.’” No you dumb piece of software, I meant “shit” the first time, and I certainly meant it when I manual-corrected you. Byte me.