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Comment by ej_campbell | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Typing on glass without auto-correct is painful. Do you really think it was a bad idea for designers to design that feature?

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I type on glass without autocorrect. I use that bar of predictions above the keyboard, which occasionally suggests words that slightly differ from what I typed, and if I made a typo, I'll gladly accept the correction. But I'd never use a "feature" that changes what I typed after I already moved on to the next word. I wouldn't call it painful, but maybe I'm unusually good at hitting the intended key most of the time.

Google's keyboard recently added the ability to auto-correct a word back, which I find really useful when I'm using swipe typing -- usually I'll fix as I go anyway, but I'm not infallible and if I expected a swipe to give me the right word, I might not otherwise notice until I go back to proof-read before hitting send.

Yes. The computer should never do something that I haven't explicitly told it to do. You can design the same exact feature but I need to trigger it, the machine should not be making decisions for me.

> When designing anything, if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.

And you think that is the right call for the majority of people?

Why would you ever want to trade accuracy for speed?

Because the OS can guess correctly more often than a typical user can type correctly. You can always proof read its work at the end.

Also, in addition to auto correcting words, your phone also auto corrects individual key presses based on the word you are typing. The same physical impact on your screen will register a different letter based on the letters that come before it.

So part of your “typing on glass accuracy” is dependent on a designer designing that feature that “does work ahead of time”.

> Because the OS can guess correctly more often than a typical user can type correctly. You can always proof read its work at the end.

No. Certainly not on a desktop, where I type much faster than any suggestion can appear (esp. infuriating on IDEs); usually not on a phone either, where "corrections", while sometimes faster than me, are always wrong.

Are you the typical user?

I use SwiftKey (without cloud predictions) and if you press spacebar that's the equivalent of "explicitly telling it". The thing is that usually, the auto correct is correct so when you see it is not you click on the word you (according to the computer) "made up", et voila.

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