OS Tips - Time Saving iPhone Keyboard Tricks

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Typing on your iPhone's touchscreen can be pretty awful: It's small, cramped, and very error prone. On today's OS Tips, I'm going to show you a few hidden tricks to make typing on your iPhone far more bearable.

1. Drag to Quick Punctuate/Capitalize

If you just want to enter one punctuation symbol or number and get back to typing with the QWERTY keyboard, hold down the .?123 button, then drag to whatever punctuation/number you want. That enters your number/symbol and puts you immediately back to QWERTY so you can let your thoughts flow uninterrupted without having to annoyingly change keyboards. The same dragging functionality applies to entering capital letters. For characters on the right side of the keyboard, you can just hold down the shift or .?123 key with your left hand, then tap whatever character you want with your right hand to achieve the same functionality more quickly. You can also use this trick to type multiple capital letters without turning on caps lock (which we'll get to later).

2. Hold Down Keys to Open More Options

Want to easily type in español or français? Hold down on a key to open a pop up menu, then drag to whichever option you'd like. Note that this doesn't work for all keys, so experiment with it.

3. Double Tap Shift for Caps Lock

Want caps lock on your iPhone? Double tap shift and START SHOUTING AT YOUR FRIENDS IN TEXTS!

4. Double Tap Space to Quick Start New Sentences

Use this shortcut to increase your iPhone typing speed. Once you reach the end of a sentence and want to start a new one, double tap space to insert a period followed by a space. Shift will even be highlighted for you for the start of the new sentence!

5. Shake to Undo/Redo

Mess up something? Quickly shake your phone back and forth to bring up the undo typing dialog box. Do the same if you change your mind to bring up the redo typing dialog box.

6. Easy Ignore Autocorrect

Isn’t it annoying when the iPhone automatically corrects your spelling even though you meant to spell the word that way? Instead of moving your finger up to the screen and pressing the little x on the box that pops up, save yourself a ton of time and just tap z followed by delete. That’s a much quicker way of clearing away the autocorrect box.

7. Intentionally Misspell for Quick Contractions

Instead of going through the trouble of changing keyboards to insert an apostrophe when you want to type “we’re,” intentionally misspell the word and have your iPhone autocorrect it for you! Type the last letter of the contraction again to then hit space to have the iPhone change the word for you. For example, type weree to get we’re and helll to get he’ll.

Do you know any other cool hidden iPhone typing tips? Let us know in the comments!