I have a confection to make. Ugh! No, I don’t want to bake a cake. Let me type that again. I have a confession to make. I worked for many years as a software developer at Apple[1] and I invented touchscreen keyboard autocorrection for the original iPhone.
I’m proif if rhe wirl… ahem… I’m proud of the work I did to bring software-assisted typing to a smartphone near you. After all, if the iPhone keyboard wasn’t based in software, Apple couldn’t have delivered on Steve Jobs' vision for a breakthrough touchscreen computer with as few fixed buttons as possible. The keyboard needed to get out of the way when it wasn’t needed so the rest of the apps on the phone could shine.
The iPhone succeeded in this, but I’m also aware that its style of keyboard autocorrection has its limits. Everyone has stories about autocorrection going awry, but the funnier these typing tales get, the more apocryphal they’re likely to be. I’m not quite as proud of giving the world a new form of low humor, the smartphone era’s version of the knock-knock joke.
Have you heard this one? A wife sends a text with a photo of herself modeling a new outfit. She asks her husband, “Does this dress make me look fat?” On the receiving end, the man’s mind knows he should tread carefully, but his thumbs don’t.
He replies, “Mooooo!”
What is up with this? It's the result of a tragicomic combination in ‘M’ and ’N’ being such close neighbors on the keyboard, the dictionary lookup that shows the sound a cow makes is actually a word, and the indifference of autocorrection to the sensitivities of this simple (but perilous!) Q&A. “Wait, honey! I didn’t mean that!”...