iPhone, Turning Off Predictive Text Input
A while back a mate of ours from Indonesia enquired how to switch off the iPhone predictive text input. Reason being although he resides in Australia most of his family and friends keep in touch through SMS and when they do, he texts them in Bahasa Indonesia. Where the iPhone’s predictive text input falls down completely. What used to be a helpful tool quickly became an annoyance whenever it attempted to suggest an English word closest matching to whatever Bahasa Indonesian word that was entered.
Strangely the ability to disable the predictive text input already exists in the iPhone operating system platform. The only thing that Apple Inc didn’t do is provide a GUI for users to switch it off.
This translates to a very simple mod whereby users need only change the Keyboard preference(plist) file in their iPhone operating system.
What needs to be done is very simple(provided you’re an amateur IT geek). What you need:
- a hacked iPhone, installed with an SSH client
- the ability to access your iPhone from a computer with an SFTP application
- the root user password for your iPhone
- updated Keyboard.plist file
Assuming you have all the above other than the Keyboard.plist file here’s how to do it:
- Download the updated Keyboard.plist file
- SSH into your iPhone
- replace Keyboard.plist located in /Applications/Preferences.app/ on the iPhone with the one you downloaded
- once installed, go to Settings> General> Keyboard on the iPhone and toggle correction off
This mod was performed on a iPhone 2.5G running firmware 1.1.4 but it should work the same on all other versions of firmware since the operating system file structure has not changed much over the revisions.
Its always advisable to backup the original Keyboard.plist file before you replace it with the one provided. In the event you need to revert to the older plist file. Generally, no rebooting of the iPhone is required for the change to take effect although its recommended.
Dedicated to Chris,… hope this helps you keep in touch with Indon smoother..
