Oh alright. One more iPhone post, but only so as to try to collect all the tips I’ve seen around the web in one handy place. Let’s get right to it. A lot of them are typing tips, but there’s some others.

---

There’s some basic things about the keyboard that everyone should know, but I’ll say them just in case. Inside “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard”, you’ll probably want to enable the “.” shortcut, so that you can get a full stop and a space just by pressing double-space at the end of a sentence. You’ll also want to enable caps lock, which I avoided for a while until I realised that it just enables double-tapping the shift key to move into caps lock. Generally speaking, if you’re using punctuation at the end of a sentence, pressing space will automatically return you to the letter keyboard, so don’t waste time switching back.

Speaking of punctuation: don’t bother typing your own apostrophes unless you really have to. By which I mean, the most common apostrophed words get auto-corrected. Type “dont” for “don’t”, “theyre” for “they’re”, etc, and the words will be automatically corrected for you. If you come up against a stinky word like “we’re”, whose apostrophe-less form also happens to be a perfectly sensible word in its own right, just repeat the last letter and type “weree” to get the phone to correct it appropriately.

If you hold down a letter for a bit, a pop-up will arrive with options for special versions of that letter, i.e. with accents and the like. This hasn’t come in handy yet, but its time will come…

It doesn’t come up much, but if you’re browsing a page which has a separate scrollable area within it, use two-fingered scrolling to scroll that area.

If you’re using your iPhone to play music, you can double-tap the home button while the screen’s locked to bring up mini iPhone controls. And if you’re NOT listening to music, but you were, then you can do the same and press play to start from wherever you left off. Presumably if you haven’t at all, it just shuffles your songs or something.

At time of writing, searching Google by actually going to google.com will give you nicely mobile-screen filling text, rather than the big spread out normal results. For some reason, using Google’s own actual searching app for the iPhone does not do this, and nor does searching through the Safari search bar. Makes me grumpy.

If I think of or find some more, I’ll add them here.

421

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Thursday, August 28th, 2008. It concerns such pressing issues as iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.