Deleting Email Addresses From a Reply

Say you are replying to a message with multiple recipients but want to delete a recipient before sending.

• Tap the To, CC or BCC field to expand it.
• Tap the address you want to remove and it will change to blue.
• Tap the Delete key.

Typing Faster

If you're struggling with typing speed on your iPhone, then you're not being wreckless enough. Your iPhone keyboard is smart enough to know what you intend to type. In many cases it can guess what you want to type, even when you miss a numerous keys.

Go ahead: type a sentence as fast as you can WITHOUT any concern for mistakes. Just type. You'll be surprised how many mistakes your iPhone corrected for. Typing with complete abandon and then correcting the few mistakes left is substantially faster than the frustration of typing cautiously. If you're typing with one finger you also might try typing with two fingers or two thumbs. You can gain even more speed this way. Another timesaver is to stick with one keyboard screen of the three and add punctuation and numbers later.

Change Shifts

iPhone's keyboard is capable of receiving more than one input at a time. So you can hold the shift key to get all caps. (You can also enable Caps Lock in Settings>General>Keyboard if that suits your typing habits better.)

This also give you another option for working with the three keyboards. Normally to get to the extended punctuation third keyboard in Mail or Notes, you press .?123 and then the curing key #+=. The third keyboard will stay engaged until you type a space. But if you hold the cursing key and let it go, it shifts back to the numbers keyboard. I know it's a small point, but one that can help you become a faster typist on your iPhone.

International Keyboard

Your iPhone has advanced international keyboard support. Go to Settings>General>Keyboard>International Keyboard to set it.

Even with the good old English keyboard many international characters are available. The characters eyuioaslzcn?! all have foreign characters available by holding the key. Then just slide your finger to the accented character you want.

Kill the Keyboard Click

Some find the keyboard clicking annoying, but I find it useful in giving you confirmation that you have indeed pressed a key. You can turn it off permenantly by going to Settings>Sounds>Keyboards Clicks off. But if you just need to turn it off temporarily, like those moments that you don't want your significant other to know you're texting your bookie in church, just turn the ringer switch at the top of the left side of your iPhone off. This silences the clicks too.

Secrets of Auto Suggest

Auto-suggest works like a real-time spell checker on your iPhone and is only visible when it pops up a word suggestion in Email, Notes or other apps. It's a little confusing at first: if it makes a suggestion and you type a space after the word, it accepts it whether you wanted it or not. To keep it from doing this, you must press the x by the suggested word to dismiss it. Seems backwards, but as time goes by its accuracy improves and you'll find you're dismissing less and less.

No, it's not your imagination. It learns to be more accurate for your typing. Auto-suggest takes words from a list built into memory, from your address book and from a user-built list. And you're the user who's been building this list from the first time you typed on your iPhone. The second time you dismissed a word, used the space bar, used punctuation or typed a return, iPhone has added your unrecognized words to the list. Also when you 've dismissed a suggestion twice the phone will no longer suggest it.

The reality is that if you've made a flub, you may actually start seeing the flub as a suggested spelling. But not to fear, autosuggest ranks words according to use. Since you never use the flub it will keep ranking the flub lower on the list and eventually stop suggesting it.

If you've really messed up the first few days you had your iPhone, you can delete the user auto-suggest list: go to Home>Settings>General>Reset>Reset Keyboard Dictionary.

On the other hand if you want to improve your odds off the bat, create a seed list. Just create a new Contact on your iPhone and type into the note field the words you want to add, each separated by a space. Since it scans your Contacts as a word source, it will suggest these words. If you use a lot of technical terms, slang or SMS abbreviations, this will greatly improve your typing speed. You can seed these words by typing them into a Contact entry on your desktop and then sync if to your iPhone.

Another point on the keyboard is that your iPhone guesses what you're trying to type based on the keys around where you hit. So if you missed a key in the middle of the word, it will determine what keys you could have been trying for based on the frequency of words you use instead of one that's more commonly used. Type ouzza and you get pizza. So even when you type fast and flub, many times auto-suggest has you covered.

It has been reported on the Net that will contractions like he'll and I'll require you to type a third l so it can determine them from will and ill. However, if you just type them in manually twice or store them in a Contact notes field they'll become suggestions. Just like they'll.

And another thing: The keyboard actually increases the size of the touch area for keys based on what it expects you'll type. So when you type tim it enlarges the area of the e key since w and r are not likely candidates.

What all this mean is that once you get moving with the iPhone keyboard not only do you improve, but your iPhone improves too.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Typing on the iPhone is faster than you'd think. By following a few tips you'll be surprised how fast you can move accurately.

• Double tap the space bar to add a period, space and start a new sentence with a cap. This is so useful that you'll miss it on your desktop.
• Instead of pressing Shift key, hold it and slide to the character you want on the numbers keyboard. This types the character and returns the keyboard to QWERTY.
• From the Number keyboard, a space automatically returns you to the QWERTY keyboard.
• The dictionary makes suggestions for mistakes and to complete words. When the suggestion is correct, press the space bar to accept. It will finish the word and add a space. Press the space bar twice to accept and it adds a period. If you don't like the suggestion, press the x to dismiss it.
• If you mistype a letter, with your finger still on the key, just slide it to the correct key.
• Type contractions without the apostrophe. The dictionary will suggest a correction for you. We'll and we're need the contraction added manually. To get to Hell (only literarily) touch the original word above the correction before typing the space.
• Delete deletes a character. Holding it deletes backwards through many letters. Holding it longer will start deleting words.
• For better accuracy, type normally with a fearless press of your finger. When you type hesitantly and daintily with the tip, you'll get more mistakes.
• Correct with the magnifier. Hold your finger over the mistake and the magnifier appears. Moving your finger moves the cursor.
• From the number keyboard there's a third keyboard available by pressing the #+= cursing key. These are the even lesser-used characters.
• Enable caps lock from Home>Settings>General>Keyboard>Enable Caps Lock. Caps lock shows as blue when you double-tap on the cap key.
• When the .com key is visible you can hold it down and .org, .net and .edu appear as a list. Slide your finger over the domain and let go to accept. This also works by holding the period on any alphabetical kb where the @ appears.
• Hold down the quote or apostrophe key for smart quotes.
  
• Benchmark yourself. This app will help you test your speed.

Eventually your cries for a Bluetooth keyboard will diminish, or be squelched out by your adeptness.