iPhone Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

Typing/Keyboard/Navigation

Only the very talented can touch-type on the iPhone’s soft keyboard, but with these tips you can type on it almost as fast as you would on a computer.

1. Spacebar Trick

If you are typing a sentence on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can rapidly press the spacebar twice to automatically add a period and a space at the end and capitalize the following letter. This might take some time to getting used to, but it can save time for those who write long texts or novels on their iPhone.

2. Scroll Up

If you want to rapidly jump to the top of a page whether in Safari, Mail, or Contacts, you can touch the status bar on top of the screen. The status bar is the area where the time, the signal strength, and the battery life are located.

3. Alphabetical Index

On some applications you can see small letters running down in alphabetical order on the right side of the screen. The common apps that have that feature are Contacts, the iPod various songs and artists lists, as well as some apps you can get from the iTunes store.

By touching those letters in the right you can jump quickly to that part of your list. You can also drag your finger along those letters to quickly jump from letter to letter.

4. All Caps

If you often type words or sentences in ALL CAPS, there’s a way of making it easier to achieve on your iPhone. Your keyboard’s caps lock feature can be enabled by going to Settings > General > Keyboard > Enable Caps Lock.

After doing so, every time you double-tap the Shift key, you enter caps lock mode. To go back to normal mode, tap the Shift key again.

5. Alternative Letters

Many of the keyboard’s letters and symbols contain hidden alternative versions of themselves which can be used for phrases and words in other languages such as French, Spanish, German, etc. To reveal a key’s multiple identities, press and hold your finger down on the key until a pop-up menu of choices appears. Play around until you choose the key that you want.

By using this trick, you will find multiple currency symbols under the $ key, different types of quotes under the quotation mark, and even website suffixes under the period.

6. URL suffixes

When you’re typing the URLs in Safari, holding down the .com key brings up different websites suffixes, including .net, .edu, and .org.

7. Rearranging iPhone Icons

The icons of your home screen can be arranged by pressing and holding on any icon until all the icons start wiggling. They you can drag any icon to any position you would like to place it, including other home screens by dragging it off the screen to the left or the right. You can delete any apps that you’ve added by pressing the X on their icons. Finally press the Home button to make the icons stop wiggling.

8. Most Common Apps

After you have well understood how to move around your icons around your screens, you can now put your most commonly used apps on your first home screen. This would be very useful because while looking at any other home screen, you can press the home button again to immediately jump back to your first home screen.

There are dots near the bottom of the screen which let you know on which home screen you have scrolled too. When you have reached the home screen, another press of the home button takes you to spotlight search.

9. Double-Clicking the Home Button

You can customize what happens when you double-click your iPhone’s home button. You can double-click the Home button for going to the first home screen, engaging a spotlight search, going to your phone favourites, taking photographs with your camera, or going to your iPod. You can make the customization by going to Settings > General > Home and decide which of the five functions you think you’ll need to access most quickly or frequently.

10. Emoji

Emoticons are always fun to include in your emails or text messages. Your iPhone has actually 461 adorable full-colour emoticons, called Emoji, hiding within its frame.

Unfortunately Emoji are only enabled on its Japanese iPhones, since it’s a standard widely used in Japan. But Emoji can be unlocked! There are many free Emoji hacks circulating on the internet, but your safest and quickest bet is probably to purchase one of the many low-cost Emoji programs from the App Store, such as iEmoji (www.spiceloop.com).