Apple have tried in Mac OS Lion to make Mac OS more like iOS. Something they borrowed from iOS is the autocomplete spellchecker. Mac OS has always had autofill (for filling in forms with address or past form data) and a spell checker but never the blue rounded hover box thingy that one gets on an iPhone or iPad. The reason for such an invention was that some of us are clumsy, lasy, fat fingered, type too fast or some combination of the above on a touch screen resulting in gibberish which iOS is very good at fixing.

When I am touch-typing on a full size physically tactile keyboard on my Mac, however, I do not have this problem. Correcting technical words and acronyms that aren’t in Apple’s dictionary to other words is completely frustrating. Hovering over the autocomplete on my own website is just downright dumb and a poor user experience.

You see I have a form where one inputs a product as well as a place that sells it. Offering the user autocompletion options from the database of already known places makes huge sense, as does auto completing addresses with data from Google maps. But Apple insists…

I could just disable automatic spelling corrections on my Mac, but what about all my website visitors, especially those on iPads?

spellcheck=”false”

Well Apple do have a developer document listing all the HTML5 attributes that Safari supports at this awful address. You’d think that either autocomplete=”off” or autocorrect=”off” (or both) would do the trick. But no. Thankfully, my good friend Tim suggested I try the spellcheck=”false” HTML5 attribute which Apple fail to even mention. Works like a charm. So there you go. Very few people seem to have mentioned this yet, so spread the word Google!