iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

The Keyboard

Very few iPhone features have triggered as much angst, hope, and criticism as the onscreen keyboard. It's true, boys and girls: The iPhone has no physical keys. A virtual keyboard, therefore, is the only possible system for entering text.

The keyboard appears automatically whenever you tap in a place where typing is possible: in an outgoing email or text message, in the Notes program, in the address bar of the Web browser, and so on.

Just tap the key you want. As your finger taps the glass, a "speech balloon" appears above your finger, showing an enlarged version of the key you actually hit (since your finger is now blocking your view of the keyboard).

In darker gray, surrounding the letters, you'll find these special keys:

• Shift (). When you tap this key, it glows white, to indicate that it's in effect. The next letter you type appears as a capital. Then the key automatically returns to normal, meaning that the next letter will be lowercase.

  Tip

  The iPhone has a Caps Lock feature, but you have to request it. In the Settings program, turn on "Enable caps lock" as described on General.

  From now on, if you double-tap the key, the key turns blue. You're now in Caps Lock mode, and you'll now type in ALL CAPITALS until you tap the key again. (If you can't seem to make Caps Lock work, try double-tapping the key fast.)

• Backspace. This key actually has three speeds.

• Tap it once to delete the letter just before the blinking insertion point.

  Hold it down to "walk" backward, deleting as you go.

  If you hold down the key long enough, it starts deleting words rather than letters, one whole chunk at a time.

• Tap this button when you want to type numbers or punctuation. The keyboard changes to offer a palette of numbers and symbols. Tap the same key—which now says ABC—to return to the letters keyboard.

• Once you're on the numbers/symbols pad, a new dark gray button appears, labeled . Tapping it summons a third keyboard layout, containing the less frequently used symbols, like brackets, the # and % symbols, bullets, and math symbols.

  Note

  Because the period is such a frequently used symbol, there's a little shortcut that doesn't require switching to the punctuation keyboard: at the end of a sentence, just tap the Space bar twice. You get a period, a space, and a capitalized letter at the beginning of the next word. (This, too, can be turned off—see General—although it's hard to imagine why you'd want to.)

• Return. Tapping this key moves to the next line, just as on a real keyboard. (There's no Tab key or Enter key in iPhone land.)

Making the Keyboard Work

Some people have no problem tapping those tiny virtual keys; others struggle for days. Either way, here are some tips:

• Don't be freaked out by the tiny, narrow keys. Apple knows that your fingertip is fatter than that.

• So as you type, use the whole pad of your finger or thumb. Go ahead—tap as though you're trying to make a fingerprint. Don't try to tap with only a skinny part of your finger to match the skinny keys. You'll be surprised at how fast and accurate this method is. (Tap, don't press.)

• This may sound like California New-Age hooey, but trust the keyboard. Don't pause to check the result after each letter. Just plow on.

• Start out with one-finger typing. Two-thumb, BlackBerry-style typing usually comes later. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start out that way.

• If you make a mistake, don't reflexively go for the Backspace key . Instead, just beneath the word you typed, you'll find the iPhone's proposed replacement. The software analyzes the letters around the one you typed and, more often than not, figures out what you really meant. For example, if you accidentally type imsame, the iPhone realizes that you meant insane, and suggests that word.

  

  To accept its suggestion, tap the Space bar or any piece of punctuation, like a period or question mark. To ignore the suggestion, tap it with your finger.

• The suggestion feature can be especially useful when it comes to contractions, which are normally clumsy to type because you have to switch to the punctuation keyboard to find the apostrophe.

• So you can save time by deliberately leaving out the apostrophe in contractions like I'm, don't, can't, and so on. Type im, dont, cant, and so on. The iPhone proposes I'm, don't, or can't, so you can just tap the Space bar to fix the word and continue.

• The suggestion feature also kicks in when the iPhone thinks it knows how you intend to complete a correctly spelled word. For example, if you type fathe, the suggestion says father. This trick usually saves you only a letter or two, but that's better than nothing.

  Tip

  Although you don't see it, the sizes of the keys on the iPhone keyboard are actually changing all the time. That is, the software enlarges the "landing area" of certain keys, based on probability.

  For example, suppose you type tim. Now, the iPhone knows that no word in the language begins timw or timr—and so, invisibly, it enlarges the "landing area" of the E key, which greatly diminishes your chances of making a typo on that last letter. Cool.

• Without cursor keys, how are you supposed to correct an error that you made a few sentences ago? Easy—use the Loupe.

  Hold your fingertip down anywhere in the text until you see the magnified circle appear. Without lifting your finger, drag anywhere in the text; you'll see that the insertion point moves along with it. Release when the blinking line is where you want to delete or add text, just as though you'd clicked there with a mouse.

  Tip

  In the Safari address bar, you can skip the part about waiting for the Loupe to appear. Once you've clicked into the address, just start dragging to make it appear at once.

  

• Don't bother using the Shift key to capitalize a new sentence. The iPhone does that capitalizing automatically. (To turn this feature on or off, see General.)

• To produce an accented character (like é, ë, è, ê, and so on), keep your finger pressed on that key for 1 second. A palette of accented alternatives appears; slide onto the one you want, as you can see here.

How to Type Punctuation with One Touch

On the iPhone, the punctuation keys and alphabet keys appear on two different keyboard layouts. That's a serious hassle, because each time you want, say, a comma, it's an awkward, three-step dance: (1) Tap the key to get the punctuation layout. (2) Tap the comma. (3) Tap the key, or just press the Space bar, to return to the alphabet layout.

Imagine how excruciating it is to type, for example, "a P.O. Box in the U.S.A."! That's 34 finger taps and 10 mode changes!

Fortunately, there's a secret way to get a punctuation mark with only a single finger gesture.

The iPhone doesn't register most key presses until you lift your finger. But the Shift and Punctuation keys register their taps on the press down instead.

So here's what you can do, all in one motion:

1. Touch the key, but don't lift your finger. The punctuation layout appears.

2. Slide your finger onto the period or comma key, and release. The ABC layout returns automatically. You've typed a period or a comma with one finger touch instead of three.

Tip

If you're a two-thumbed typist, you can also hit the key with your left thumb, and then tap the punctuation key with your right. It even works on the sub-punctuation layout, although you'll probably visit that screen less often.

In fact, you can type any of the punctuation symbols the same way. This technique makes a huge difference in the usability of the keyboard.

Tip

This same trick saves you a finger-press when capitalizing words, too. You can put your finger down on the key and slide directly onto the letter you want to type in its uppercase version. Or, if you're a two-handed iPhone typist, you can work the Shift key like the one on your computer: Hold it down with your left thumb, type a letter with your right, and then release both.

How the Dictionary Works

The iPhone has an English dictionary (minus the definitions) built in. As you type, it compares what you've typed against the words in that dictionary (and against the names in your address book). If it finds a match or a partial match, it displays a suggestion just beneath what you've typed.

If you tap the Space bar to accept the suggestion, wonderful.

If you don't—if you dismiss the suggestion and allow the "mistake" to stand—then the iPhone adds that word to a custom, dynamic dictionary, assuming that you've just typed some name, bit of slang, or terminology that wasn't in its dictionary originally. It dawns on the iPhone that maybe that's a legitimate word it doesn't know—and adds it to the dictionary. From now on, in other words, it will accept that bizarre new word as a legitimate word—and, in fact, will even suggest it the next time you type something like it.

Words you've added to the dictionary actually age. If you stop using some custom term, the iPhone gradually learns to forget it. That's handy behavior if you never intended for that word to become part of the dictionary to begin with (that is, it was a mistake).

Tip

If you feel you've really made a mess of your custom dictionary, and the iPhone keeps suggesting ridiculous alternate words, you can always start fresh. From the Home screen, tap Settings → General → Reset, and then tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary. Now the iPhone's dictionary is the way it was when it came from the factory, without any of the words it learned from you.

International Typing

As the iPhone goes on sale around the world, it has to be equipped for non-English languages—and even non-Roman alphabets. Fortunately, it's ready.

To prepare the iPhone for language switching, go to Settings → General → International. Tap Language to set the iPhone's primary language (for menus, button labels, and so on).

To make other keyboards available, tap Keyboards, and then turn on the keyboard layouts you'll want available: Russian, Italian, whatever.

If you choose Japanese or Chinese, you're offered the chance to specify which kind of character input you want. For Japanese, you can choose a QWERTY layout or a Kana keypad. For Simplified or Traditional Chinese, you have a choice of the Pinyin input method (which uses a QWERTY layout) or handwriting recognition, where you draw your symbols onto the screen with your fingertip; a palette of potential interpretations appears to the right. (That's handy, since there are thousands of characters in Chinese, and you'd need a 65-inch iPhone to fit the keyboard.)

Now, when you arrive at any writing area in any program, you'll discover that a new icon has appeared on the keyboard: a tiny globe () right next to the Space bar. Each time you tap it, you rotate to the next keyboard you requested earlier. The new language's name appears briefly on the Space bar to identify it.

Thanks to that button, you can freely mix languages and alphabets within the same document, without having to duck back to some control panel to make the change. And thanks to the iPhone's virtual keyboard, the actual letters on the "keys" change in real time. (As an Apple PR rep puts it, "That's really hard to do on a BlackBerry.")