Apple has a pretty long and storied history naming their products after celebrities. In fact, it goes way back to 1994, when Apple’s engineers code-named the Power Macintosh 7100 “Carl Sagan” because they hoped to sell “billions and billions” of them. Sagan C&Ded Apple over the codename, which prompted Apple’s engineers to rename the computer internally to the BHA, or “Butt-Head Astonomer.”
Now reports indicate that Apple’s at it again, calling iOS 5’s upcoming Shortcut text-expansion feature after another butthead, Ashton Kutcher.
The revelation comes, bizarrely enough, in the latest issue of TV Guide:
“It’s Week 3 of work on the Two and a Half Men set, and Ashton Kutcher is still getting to know his costars. Conversation drifts toward mobile phones, and Kutcher reveals there’s a feature on the iPhone 5 that Apple internally calls “The Kutcher.”
What’s “The Kutcher”? “An in-mail editable text expander,” the actor explains. Jon Cryer and Angus T. Jones are dumbfounded. “Jon, how many times did we have this same conversation with Charlie?” jokes 17-year-old Jones. Cryer quips back: “All the time. He was always talking about the new spellcheck on the iPhone.”
The feature in question is iOS 5’s Shortcut, which works like TextExpander and allows iOS users to expand certain shortcuts into larger chunks of text just by entering them. For example, [add] might expand to your full address.
No word on why they are calling Shortcut “Kutcher,” but the simplest explanation is probably the most likely and it all has to do with Kutcher’s prolific Tweeting, which probably could make use of some baked-in text expansion options.
[via The Next Web]
