iPhone Spelling Mistake Blunder
It’s generally taken for granted that a cutting edge company such as Apple has a well oiled system of editors and copywriters who check software releases for errors before they go live. Unfortunately, it seems that the system has broken down with the latest iPhone software release.
Apple has written the Categories menu on the new Podcast download area of the new app as “Catagories”. The error is even more unfortunate, as the correct spelling of the word can be seen at the bottom of the page.
Macworld humorously referenced back to Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice president of platform experience, who said:
I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right. We will argue over literally a single pixel.
I’ve done the math, and in order to miss the word ‘Catagories’, Scott has overlooked eight hundred and six pixels… He needs to have a few strong words with whoever has been delegated the loupe in recent months.
It will be interesting to see what move Apple takes to correct this. Will they treat it as a priority and push out another software release fairly quickly, or will they simply wait until the next iPhone software update is due? Personally, I expect they’ll wait for a future release — updating the software on your iPhone can be a fairly lengthy process for users (especially those with slow internet connections), and they’re unlikely to be too concerned with a minor spelling error.
I’m interested to know — have you ever noticed any spelling mistakes with previous releases (iPhone or otherwise)?
EDIT: Well, it looks like Apple quickly fixed that issue by updating the download package. How unfortunate (for this article).
How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges?
Filed under: Odds and ends
Newer updates to Mac OS X Leopard seem to have an interesting problem with their spelling databases: they include words that are most certainly wrong. The problem first appeared in 10.5.2 (U.S. English), and has not yet been corrected.
Canspice.org points to an Ars Technica discussion from March highlighting the misspelling knswledgable. If you open TextEdit, for example, and intentionally misspell the word “knowledgeable” (say, by spelling it “knowledgable”), then control-click to show a spelling suggestion, you might see the erroneous option.
The word “cartgriqdge” also appears to be similarly affected. Both words do not appear in the Mac OS X Dictionary application.
Urban Dictionary seized upon the new word, defining knswledgable as having “inordinate amounts of knowledge about useless spelling trivia.”
How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Zut alors! MacBook announcement doesn’t translate well
Filed under: Humor, Bad Apple, MacBook
Thanks to what appears to be a character encoding problem on a French version of the Apple website, the MacBook announcement — meant to say “perfectly designed” in French — came out reading “perfectly dumb” (or as one of our tipsters said, a more vulgar version of “perfectly poopy”).
That wasn’t the only problem: according to Macenstein, a Macgeneration article noted that the announcements were replete with spelling and grammatical errors. (Link is en français.)
The pages have since been updated with better grammar.
Unfortunately my decade-old high school French can’t tell me what about the grammar is wrong, but hopefully our commenters can let us know by leaving a comment.
Thanks, Bertie and Fabrizio!
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