iPhone Spelling Mistake Blunder

David Appleyard — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:30:09 +0000

It’s generally taken for granted that a cutting edge company such as Apple has a well oiled system of editors and copywriters who check software releases for errors before they go live. Unfortunately, it seems that the system has broken down with the latest iPhone software release.

Apple has written the Categories menu on the new Podcast download area of the new app as “Catagories”. The error is even more unfortunate, as the correct spelling of the word can be seen at the bottom of the page.

Macworld humorously referenced back to Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice president of platform experience, who said:

I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right. We will argue over literally a single pixel.

I’ve done the math, and in order to miss the word ‘Catagories’, Scott has overlooked eight hundred and six pixels… He needs to have a few strong words with whoever has been delegated the loupe in recent months.

It will be interesting to see what move Apple takes to correct this. Will they treat it as a priority and push out another software release fairly quickly, or will they simply wait until the next iPhone software update is due? Personally, I expect they’ll wait for a future release — updating the software on your iPhone can be a fairly lengthy process for users (especially those with slow internet connections), and they’re unlikely to be too concerned with a minor spelling error.

I’m interested to know — have you ever noticed any spelling mistakes with previous releases (iPhone or otherwise)?

EDIT: Well, it looks like Apple quickly fixed that issue by updating the download package. How unfortunate (for this article).

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Words that Leopard’s spellchecker chokes on

Nick Mediati — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:30:33 +0000

We trust spellcheckers to be right, right? We expect that the spellchecker will yield an accurate correction, or at the least, real words. Oddly enough, though, I’ve stumbled upon a few misspellings that cause Leopard’s built-in spellchecker to throw up some amusing–though incorrect–results (a friend shared one with me; I discovered two of them). Mind you, I never added any of these to my spellchecker dictionary. These are all using the default English spelling dictionary; I even checked while using a new user account. At any rate, here they are, in no particular order:

The typo: instrucitons

The intended word: instructions

The suggested spelling: isntrucitons

The notes: The spellchecker does offer the correct spelling as one of the choices; how isntrucitons ended up in there is beyond me…

The typo: applicatication

The intended word: application

The suggested spelling: applicaticataion

The notes: FAIL.

Also, Dictionary.com offers up upland cotton as a possible alternate for applicaticataion and no alternates whatsoever for applicatication. That said, it was one heck of a typo on my part in the first place, but that’s no excuse for making up words! :P

The typo: positiove

The intended word: positive

The suggested spelling: positionve

The notes: Like the first one, the correct word was among the choices, but again, Leopard decides to have a little fun with our minds.

I’m guessing these are just bugs in the spellchecker. Hey, at least this bug is mostly harmless!

Are there any words that you have noticed that spellchecker gets incorrect? Let us know in the comments.

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iPhone Spelling Mistake Blunder

Words that Leopard’s spellchecker chokes on