How to Type Perfectly, Part I

Suppose you were writing an email using Apple's Mail program. Suppose you made some typing mistakes (who me?). Suppose your email looked like this:



Not very good! But, those red underlines do show you where you made mistakes, and there are plenty of ways to make corrections. I will cover those in a future blog post. For now, though, let's learn how to have Mail correct the problems as you type rather than just underline them. It's a simple one-step procedure.

All you do is get an email window up, and then go to the Edit menu and turn on Correct Spelling Automatically. With that checked, the exact same typing is corrected, behind your back, without you doing anything at all.



Here is how it looks when you make the same typing mistakes, but with Correct Spelling Automatically checked. I'm not kidding. Every single mistake was corrected without me doing ANYTHING. You should try it.



Turns out that this automatic correction works a bunch of other places but Mail is where you will use it the most.

Sorry to say that this only works in OS X 10.6 and higher. Another reason to get to 10.6.

Putting It Another Way

I've thought quite a bit about this Apple, Adobe, and Flash issue. I think it comes down to this: Adobe is saying "Hardware doesn't matter." They have an idea for an app (for a smartphone) or an idea for a desktop application (for a Mac or a PC), and then they try to make it run on all of the machines they can. They don't care which phone you use-- iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, something else-- they just want to get their program to work on it, and if they're able to make it work on your phone, you can be sure that it will look exactly the way it looks on someone else's phone. Even if you have an iPhone with lots of cool hardware features, and the other guy has some other phone that isn't as good. Adobe starts "at the top" with an idea of how they want their app to work. The hardware that it runs on is irrelevant to them.

Same thing with their desktop applications (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.). They have an idea of what their program should be, and then they try to fit it onto Macs and onto PCs. They ignore much of what makes a Mac special, because that's not interesting to them. Adobe's focus is on getting Photoshop to run on as many machines as possible-- and to look exactly the same, whether you're running a Mac or a PC. Again, the hardware doesn't matter to them.

The problem with this, of course, is that some machines are simply better than others. Some phones have accelerometers, and GPS devices, and touch screens. Others don't. Macs have features that PCs don't, notably the Mac OS X operating system and a set of user interface guidelines that make using a Mac a consistent, predicable experience-- unless you're using Adobe applications, with their own Print and Save As and Open dialog boxes, a complete thumbing of the nose to the ones Apple provides for all developers to use.

If you're making smoothies it doesn't really matter if your blender is a Waring or a Hamilton Beach. If you're painting a house you can use a brush from Ace or from Home Depot (but use the one from Home Depot, I have stock). In cases like that, nobody cares about the hardware, because when you get right down to it all blenders blend, and all paint brushes paint, and there's not a lot of difference between them. When you're dealing with phones, and desktop/laptop computers, there IS a lot of difference between the offerings from different companies, and when Adobe ignores those differences, you (the iPhone and Mac owner) end up with the same crummy experience that people with lesser phones and computers get. And it's not very good.

In my opinion, hardware DOES matter. It matters a lot. So does the operating system. Adobe doesn't think so, Apple does, and that's the root of this conflict.

Apple, Adobe, and Flash

You may have heard that Apple's iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch do not run Flash. Flash is Adobe's plug-in software, used by web designers for animations and video. Apple doesn't like Flash because it's buggy and slow, and-- I suspect-- because it leads to sloppy, cheesy websites with gratuitous rollover action.

Adobe gives away the Flash plug-in-- you probably have it. They sell the tools that developers use to MAKE Flash (you watch it for free, but the people who make it pay to make it). This is a nice business for Adobe, with no real competition. They'd like to keep that going.

Adobe also makes tools that help people make applications for cellular phones-- including, but not restricted to, iPhones. Using Adobe's tools, which they sell, a programmer could write ONE program and have it work on an iPhone, a Blackberry, a Google Droid, etc. That's not possible with any other tool today. You can imagine how appealing this is to a programmer-- write your app once, and sell it to everyone with a smart phone, whether that device is an iPhone or not.

The trouble with Adobe's write once, works everywhere approach is that all smart phones are not created equal. A programmer then has to develop for the least common denominator-- that is, the set of features common to all smart phones. (Example: iPhones have accelerometers built in, so when you rotate the screen your email and your web page etc. can rotate automatically. Other smart phones don't have accelerometers. A programmer writing an app for a wide audience would not include features reliant on accelerometers because those features would only work on the iPhone.) The result is a watered-down, dumbed-down, why-did-I-spend-all-this-money-for-an-iPhone-if-the-apps-don't-take-advantage-of-its-features experience. It was the same way with Java-- you might remember. I remember, and Apple remembers, and Apple's not going to let it happen again.

Apple's recently changed its agreement with iPhone app developers to say, in effect, "use Apple software to create your apps. Otherwise, they won't be approved for sale in the App Store." Pretty compelling argument to the developer! Apple wants to ensure that applications take full advantage of the features they've built into the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPhone OS, and eliminating a middle-man (Adobe) that may not be motivated to do so is a good move in terms of guaranteeing a high-quality experience for users of Apple's devices.

Adobe's come down on Apple, officially and unofficially, saying that not supporting Flash is bad for users, nevermind bad for Adobe, and that forcing app developers to use Apple's tools will lead to stifled creativity etc. This has gone on for a few weeks now, played out on blogs and in interviews, but now Steve Jobs has addressed the issues in a nice long letter. It's interesting reading. Provide the coffee and I'll talk it over with you.

Here's the link to Steve Jobs' letter.