iPhone Tricks
I thought I might try to compile a list of nice iPhone tricks, ones that many people might not be aware of.
Surprisingly, a lot of the best and most productive tips are not really spelled out too well for most people. Many of these are almost automatic with the predictive correction, but you should be aware of them to make the best use of them.
• When people say “trust the iPhone’s keyboard,” they mean that you should not concern yourself with the typos that you are aware you are making, nor should you be constantly checking what you typed for mistakes. There is an urge born of habit which makes you stop typing and want to backtrack once you realize you made a error; the iPhone’s corrective typing makes this unnecessary almost all of the time. For example, I tried to type “mysterious” using the iPhone keypad, and instead typed “musteripua.” After typing that initual “u” instead of the “y” I had the urge to go back and retype it. Instead, I plodded on and made more errors–but when I finished, the iPhone was ready to swap my abomination of typing with the word I wanted–“mysterious.” So don’t constantly fret over typos, just barge on forward, and the few mistakes you do make can easily be corrected later on review; do things this way and you’ll be typing a lot faster. It also allows you to do broad-surface thumb typing.
• Be mindful of the predictive correction’s interface–you may have the urge to tap the correct spelling which pops up under the word you’re typing. Don’t do it–tapping the correction will make it go away. To accept a correction, just hit “space.” If a correction pops up before you’re finished typing, hit the space bar early, and it’ll pop into place.
• Don’t worry about capitalizing the names of days, months, the pronoun “I” or the first word in a sentence–these happen automatically. Auto capitalization sometimes happens with proper nouns, but that is spotty at best, and works bet with names you use often.
• Don’t try to type apostrophes, these are almost always added in automatically.
• When ending a sentence with a period, just tap the space bar twice; it’ll type a period and a space for you.
But here are some keyboard tricks you might not have known about:
• Instead of tapping the “123” button, typing punctuation, and then typing either the “ABC” or the “space” bar to get back to letters again, just do a swipe. Start with your finger on the “123” button, but don’t lift your finger; the keyboard will change. Then drag your finger to the right button; the pop-up key tab for the button will show. Then let go. The punctuation you wanted will appear, and you’ll be popped right back into the letter keyboard again. With practice, this can be a fast swiping move.
• When typing a URL, you can see the “.com” button at the bottom of the screen. Hold it down, and “.net”, “.edu”, and “.org” will also be available. The same is available in Mail when you hold down the “.” (period) button.
• To get extra characters, you should activate the Japanese “Kana” keyboard. Go to the Settings app, tap on “General,” then “Keyboard,” then “International Keyboards”; scroll down to “Japanese” and tap on it, then switch “Kana” on. Next, when you are typing, tap the ‘globe’ key, and cycle through your keyboards until you get to the Kana keyboard; it should look like a telephone keypad, except with Japanese hiragana character on it. On the left, tap the “ABC” button, then tap the same button again (it should now say “[star]123”. Note the special symbols under each number. Tap any number key more than once to get the special symbols; wait after you tap for a submenu to appear with alternate symbols.
Here are some general iPhone tricks you may not have known about:
• Holding down the Home button for about 6 seconds will force-quit an app.
• Holding down the Home and Sleep/Wake button for about 10 seconds will force-shut down your iPhone.
• Quickly pressing the Home and Sleep buttons together will take a screen grab of what’s currently showing on your iPhone and save it as a PNG file in your photos area, which you can then download to your computer.
• If you have credit cards with billing addresses in more than one country, you can download apps and music from the iTunes Store (which contains the App Store) in different locales. I have cards in the U.S. and in Japan, so I can access both countries’ stores. This functionality can extend to the iPhone, but you can’t switch stores unless you do it through iTunes. To make your iPhone recognize a different iTunes Store, just set iTunes on your main computer to the right country, log in, then sync with your iPhone. The iPhone will switch to the country you set on your computer, and draw from that account.
• In the iPod, you may want to skip forward or back only a few seconds, something which is difficult if you use the slider bar at the top. But if you hold down on the “skip” buttons (the ones on either side of the play/pause button in the controls, which look like |<< and >>|) then it will skip forward slowly.
• Volume control takes getting used to. You may think that you turned the volume all the way up, but sometimes the volume settings change between different apps, like the iPod and the phone. In at least once case, I noticed that I could max the volume by both using the on-screen volume slider and the physical volume buttons o the side of the phone.
• Japan only: SMS info: on the White Plan, you get unlimited SMS messages, but due to Japan’s SMS system, SoftBank cannot exchange SMS with DoCoMo or Au phones. Go figure. This is not really a trick, but it is a tip of sorts.
That’s all for now, but I’ll be back with more later, if and when I find them.