keyboard
So I guess many of you don’t know some of the hidden features of the iPhone keyboard. Being an idiot, I didn’t for a long time as well. Goto Settings – General – Keyboard and you’ll see the screen here on the left. Starting at the bottom see the “.” Shortcut toggle (BTW, toggle just means on/off switch)? Did you know that if you hit the space two times that it leaves a period and the one space to start your next sentence? This is a very nice feature! Above that is Enable Caps Lock. It is very annoying always having to hit the shift key to type something like TITANS! Well, with this toggle on all you have to do to enable Caps Lock is tap the Shift key twice. Instead of the usual glowing arrow that tells you your next letter will be upper case, the whole Shift key turns blue. Tapping the Shift key again turns Caps Lock back off. The next two options up are Auto-Capitalization and Auto-Correction which gives you the option of turning these features on or off. Personally, I think the auto-correction does a nice job and like it on. Probably because I’m such a poor speller. However, for whatever reason I find auto-cap annoying. Thus, I leave that one off sometimes. So now that we’ve looked at the settings for the keyboard lets look at some of the hidden keys. First, do you know if you tap and hold the a, e, i, l, n, s, u, y etc. that you get additional letter options like adding a tilde? While nice, I personally never use that. What I do use is pressing and holding the .com button. That gives you options for .net, .edu and .org. Lastly, another “hidden feature” I use often involves hitting the .?123 button left of the spacebar. I guess its called the change page button as it takes you to the keyboard page containing the numbers and other characters. If you are in Safari its the @123 button, but its always left of the spacebar. If you know you are going to that page for just one character – say the @ symbol in a url or just a single digit, then just press and hold that button. When the new page appears slide to the symbol or number you need. Once you release it types that character and takes you back to the original keyboard layout. If any of this was confusing just check out the video tutorial below that’s on my YouTube channel.