That lifetime subscription transfer thing is not good customer relations. It's not really effectively a lifetime subscription if you have to pay a reasonable portion of it again in that same lifetime for circumstances totally beyond your control (and likely to boot).

My, god, talk about irritating skeuomorphism in OS X Lion--I just fired up the full screen version of Photo Booth. Is this not a clear step backwards? I don't know how to operate a "real" photo booth, and there's no obvious indication of how to get the standard OS X controls back--what is the gain from the cutesy curtain metaphor?

Their bullshit excuse is that it was more than 3 years into the lifetime, had it been less, they would have waived the transfer fee. The tech on the phone suggested that I call back and escalate. Given that I've been a tivo customer for umpteen years, own three tivos, and in fact, still pay for a sub to the old Humax box will hopefully get them to waive the lifetime fee. I'm okay with paying $79 for a refurbished box. Or even $99 for the upgrade.

Good luck. I once called to cancel Tivo service and still got billed. I called back and gave them holy hell about it and they STILL argued with me, maybe I wasn't firm enough about "I'm moving to Germany" (which I wasn't, but that's what I told them). Possibly the worst customer service I have ever had.

I get that TiVo needs to make $$ but I will likely need a new TiVo box since I am finally entering into 2006 and getting a new tv. It seems from the TiVo website that the following is true:

a. The only people who can now get lifetime sub are people who have them now

b. to transfer one to a new box is pretty expensive (400) in my case.

I like TiVo but I think I will use the cable provider's box for a bit.

Gah! Why can't Mail just red underline the mis-spelt words? I don't want to correct them as I type, because you put in ridiculous shit, and I don't want you to do an F7 style check afterwards, because you're checking quoted text, and that's stupid, and other people don't need to be held to British English testing rules anyway.

It's strange that some things in Lion feel like a deliberate deviation from "how stuff works now". I'm not sure what the point is in changing that. Is there an advantage to shifting from the norms? Does it improve the user experience?

I assume auto correct is to again make it feel more like an iOS device. Which I agree is awful. Are you anti-Thunderbird?

The point is to be consistent with iOS, which is where Apple must imagine most of the new Mac OS customers are going to come from a this point.

Be that as it may, I think that Lion does some things to be consistent with iOS that DON'T work well in a desktop OS. The autocorrect is an excellent example.

iOS-style autocorrect is amazing (or at least good) for a phone with a software keyboard on which one is very likely to make a specific type of mistake - mostly missed keys. The mistakes made on a full-size computer keyboard are completely different (mostly swapped letters - teh rather than the) and it's much faster and easier to correct by hand in those situations, especially if the autocorrect often gets it wrong. An autocorrect that corrects very sporadically is okay - the Word version is pretty good - but one that tries to autocorrect as often as the iOS one would be a nightmare on a desktop computer.

Apple needs to be careful in remembering that consistency doesn't necessarily mean identical. They didn't make the same mistake MS did of trying to model their mobile OS directly on their desktop OS, for the very good reason that the platforms are different. Greatly modifying their desktop OS to match the mobile OS is just as bad. Sometimes it's harmless - the Launchpad for apps is fine - but sometimes it's harmful, as in this example and several others that ita ! has complained about. (Disappearing scroll bars? As she points out, it's not always obvious that content continues beyond the control without the scroll bar. In mobile space, we accept that loss in exchange for the real estate, but that's not nearly as important on a full-size computer).

I'm gonna look at Thunderbird (I'm guessing it's pretty much like the PC version, which I have installed, but don't really read email on that computer) and Sparrow too.

And, what you said, Gris. I don't want to run important apps on iOS. It's why I have an Android tablet. But I wouldn't even want to run Android apps on a full form factor machine. They're both for mobile platforms. I'm going to assume that the Mail autocorrect is using a different algorithm from iOS autocorrect, but the very premise of that sort of autocorrect seemed to hinge on fatfingering a virtual keyboard, not a physical one.

Convergence on full size touch screen form factor will be great, but I hope that the OS X Lions and Windows 8 aren't getting there too far ahead of the hardware. The Lion "natural" touchpad metaphor makes more sense to me if my fingers are touching the content, for instance. The way I get it all to work is to imagine I'm manipulating a tablet at that moment. And then go back to mousier places where I'm moving the scroll bar instead of the page when I am using Windows 7.

You can turn off the autocorrect feature in the Languages & Text control panel. You can also tell it what language you would like, and there is a setting for British English and US English.