My favourite Twitter client on iOS is TweetBot. It is there on both my iPhone and my iPad. I simply love it. There can probably be no comparison between the Twitter for iPhone/iPad (or any other third-party Twitter app) and TweetBot. The only little downside is that it is not free. It has to be bought separately on both the iPhone and iPad. But, it is a small price for an awesome piece of app.
Naturally, I wanted something as good as TweetBot on Mac. TweetBot wasn’t for Mac, and Twitter for Mac became a pain to use. I tried TweetDeck but couldn’t stand the sight of it. And then, TweetBot for Mac came along. It came as Alpha first, and remained Alpha for a while and was free to download and use. It then turned to Beta, and finally, it was released. There was a price tag on the final version, and I happily bought it off the Mac App Store. There were bugs here and there, but overall, it worked solidly. It was every bit as good as its iOS counterparts.
iOS has an “Auto Correct” functionality–which can be turned off from the settings, but which you shouldn’t do if you want to be able to type/tap text at ease on your device–which is smart enough to automatically detect what you’re typing that isn’t correct, suggest a correction, and then correct it. It is so unbelievably good that once you get used to, which takes very little time, you cannot simply live without it. At all. The same auto-correct feature is available on the latest OS X versions on the Mac as well. However, unlike the auto-correct on iOS which pops up a visible suggestion giving you an option to select or discard it, the auto-correct on Mac isn’t so effective because when you are typing fast on a keyboard, and as you type away, the auto-correct applies the suggested corrections without your really noticing them. The end result is that you end up with text with certain words that you did not remember typing at all and which, while are correct, don’t really make sense in the context. This becomes really very annoying.
While it is possible to globally disable “auto-correct” on OS X via settings, a lot of the apps unfortunately still override the setting. For those apps, the setting can be manually disabled from the “Edit > Spelling and Grammar” menu.
The same is the case with TweetBot for Mac. With one catch: you can manually disable the auto-correct from the menu bar, but not permamently. Every time you open a new compose tweet window, the setting is overriden once again. That’s annoying as hell.
Not having found any solution, I wrote to Tapbots (the authors of TweetBot) about it. They confirmed that indeed it was a bug in the current version and that it would be fixed in the new release. However, for the meantime, they suggested a temporary fix for the auto-correct that requires running a command on the Terminal. It’s pretty easy. All you have to do is open up Terminal, and run the following command:
defaults write com.tapbots.TweetbotMac TextAutoCorrect -bool NO
That’s it! Auto-correct will be permanently disabled for TweetBot for Mac. Bliss!
I would like to thank the Tapbots guys for kindly providing the fix and acknowledging the problem.
Libel 