Ever since Mac OS X Lion was introduced, I’ve been trying to figure out why it adopted autocorrection à la iOS style. Up until today, it didn’t make any sense at all - it makes it virtually impossible to type stuff without getting autocorrected all over the place (at least if you’ve got some kind of keyboard training in your blood).

So why do I think it makes sense in all of a sudden? Because I saw my father write an e-mail this morning.

My parents are still on Snow Leopard, and watching my father writing that e-mail without looking at the screen even once (yes, he’s focused on the keyboard when he’s on the Mac) made it apparent why the autocorrect feature might make sense: the e-mail my father wrote was short, and contained a few minor spelling mistakes - if he’d been on Lion, it would have helped him craft the perfect e-mail in one go without requiring him to look at the screen.

I’m pretty sure the autocorrect feature works equally well for those who actually look at the screen, but still type at modest speeds. For programmers and furios key slammers though, it will (probably) still cause more havoc then help - we just want to dump our brains and then correct whatever was wrong (if anything). For every time the autocorrect feature kicks in for us, an expensive context switch is performed by our brains, and hence we get disturbed.

My five cents. Makes sense?