Spell Checking on the iPad
The auto-correction feature on the iPhone still amazes me. I can blaze away with both thumbs and ninety percent of the time it will correctly guess what I’m trying to type. I’ve been tapping away at little mobile screens for a decade now and have never felt so comfortable inputting text.
The iPad and iOS 4 have introduced a new trick. The system automatically spell checks your text and underlines errors in red. If you’ve used Word or any recent Mac it will be instantly familiar to you. Tap on an underlined word and choose the correct one. Simple as pie.
It’s a good idea but it is not implemented very well. Here are the main problems:
There’s no easy way to tell the system to learn or ignore a word.
I’m finding that almost every time I write an email or a note something gets flagged as an error that isn’t. It’s just a word that the dictionary doesn’t know. Names of people and places are commonly flagged, as are most Japanese words. I think I should be able to teach the system the word from the little contextual menu that pops up but it’s not possible. I get a message saying “No Replacement Found” but no way to remove the red line. What I can do is add a new contact to the Contacts app with the flagged word as the name. It’s a time consuming piece of hackery that feels completely out of place on the iPad.
You can’t turn off spell checking globally without also losing auto-correction.
I tried going without auto-correction for a while on my iPad but found it so cumbersome that I decided that I’d rather put up with red squiggles strewn throughout my text than go without it. The idea of using my phone without it is just ridiculous.
Spell checking can’t be turned off on an app by app basis.
Apple’s iWork programs have an easy to find toggle for spell checking. This, apparently, is not available to third party developers. It seems that someone at Apple realized that not everyone would want spell checking on all the time. It’s a pity that other developers don’t have the chance to do the same thing.
Here are some things Apple could do to fix spell checking:
Allow users to add words to the dictionary right from the contextual menu. This seems like the most sensible option to me and what I think most users would expect to be able to do.
Allow users to turn off spell check separately from auto-correction. I really hoped this would be addressed by iOS 4 but, alas, it is not.
Allow developers to add a spell check toggle to their programs. This is the least attractive option. It would add work for developers and also for users who would have to find the toggle somewhere. It could get confusing pretty fast with people losing track of where they do or don’t have it enabled.
Apple worked for two years to get copy and paste working just right. They probably could have introduced a half-baked implementation along with the original iPhone or iPhone 3G but they didn’t. They kept working on it till it felt just right. I wish they had shown the same care in building the spell check feature. It’s still early days yet for both the iPad and iOS 4. I hope that Apple do something to make spell check easier to use sooner rather than later.