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.

Mail now has three spell checking options: never, as I type, and when I click Send¹. I've tried all three (and my language is already set to British English--it always is on all my computers, even at work, along with the date formats). But here are my issues with how they're implementing spelling correction now:

• never: Well, you know--I don't want to send out mistakes. And I will, without any spell checking at all.
• as I type: Auto-corrects unless I interrupt my typing to tell it not to, assuming I catch it at the time.
• when I click Send: This is F7 type spell checking, like you might do (or have done) in Word before you deem a document finished. It's better than nothing, except for the part where it also spell checks quoted text, and as you noted--I'm using British English. 2/3 of the people who are sending me email aren't. So there are a lot of false hits, and if I've interspersed quoted text with my own, the chances of cocking it all up are pretty large

I don't get how this is better than what they had before, especially since browsers do the red underline thing, word processors do it...I'd rather have Mail be more like MacBook and PC applications than an iPod application. How is that even a question?

¹: I'm not sure what you're controlling with the "Correct spelling automatically" selection in Languages & Text, but it's not Mail. Mail has its control in its own Preferences.

With "Check spelling" set to "As I type" in Mail Prefs, I get the red line and not autocorrect. And I seem to have "Correct spelling automatically" checked in Language & Text. Huh.

That's 5.3 (1280), -t?

I have a little tag that appears when I'm near to the end of the word (like on my iPod), and if I just keep going with the word that's not in the dictionary, it replaces it with what was in the taggy thingy. It's fucking irritating. I tried to take a screenshot, but losing focus makes the suggestion disappear. Skitch is pretty good for free, but no timed captures.

6.0 (1485)

Might need Mountain Lion. I don't remember how the spelling check worked before I upgraded, but I know Mail wanted a software update right after the OS.