Friday August 29, 2008

Auto-correct FTW!

by Mark Kraemer in Image

6 comments

I’ve turned off most auto-correct functionality in Word and PowerPoint, because they typically don’t correctly identify my intentions. I meant that to be a dash. Please don’t change it to an em dash!

But recently I’ve seen auto-correct features that are truly useful. In this example from the Mac version of NEAT Receipts, I can type a literal like “wednesday,” or “last tuesday,” or “next monday” and it will look up the date for me.

Details like that provide great ease of use and a sense of friendliness.

Have you found other examples like this in the wild? Share them with us in the comments below.

Comments on “Auto-correct FTW!”

1. MikeWhoBikes said:

   Google Calendar does something similar with their Quick Add feature. For example, I can simply enter “Climb everest on the last Friday of every month” and it creates a recurring event for me so I don’t forget.

2. Kim Fransman said:

   check out www.datejs.com I’ve used in some of my apps, really is user friendly!

3. Michelle said:

   Remember the Milk does this too.

4. Tobias said:

   37signals/svn use it in their app backpack. but they also wrote in some blogpost (that i cannot find right now) that they wont integrate it into basecamp since it is to complicated to get it right…

   nevertheless: I like automisations like this and use them all the time in ms outlook

5. Jan said:

   nice post. thx :)

6. aaron said:

   warning: giving microsoft props here…in microsoft outlook calendar, i’ve found that phrases like (this friday, next tuesday, next month, 3 days ago, yesterday, tomorrow, today, day after tomorrow, 1 week after next monday) work. there are even some relative phrases that add to the value in the current date field (2 months, 3 weeks 1 day, etc.). also, in microsoft money, if you just type ‘t’ while focus in the date field, it’ll change the value to today’s current date. i use this all the time