iPhone Keyboard Secrets
June 15th, 2008Some of the iPhone Keyboard Secrets
* If you make a mistake tapping those tiny little on-screen keys, just beneath the word you typed, you’ll find the iPhone’s proposed replacement in a tiny bubble. 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 “hadpy,” the iPhone realizes that you meant “happy,” and suggests that word.
To accept its suggestion, tap the Space bar. To ignore the suggestion, just keep typing. (To get rid of the suggestion, tap it with your finger. But there’s not much point, since typing on ahead serves the same purpose.)
* The suggestion feature can be especially useful when it comes to contractions, which are normally clumsy to type because you have to switch to a secondary, punctuation keyboard to find the apostrophe. So you can deliberately leaving out the apostrophe. Just type “im,” “dont,” “cant” and so on. The iPhone proposes “I’m,” “don’t,” or “can’t,” so that 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, though.
* Although you don’t see it with your eyes, the sizes of the keys on the iPhone keyboard are changing all the time. That is, the software enlarges the “landing area” of certain keys, based on probability.
For example, supposed 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. Very cool.
* Without cursor keys, how are you supposed to correct an error that you made a few sentences ago?
You hold your fingertip down anywhere in the text; a magnified circle appears. Without lifting your finger, you drag anywhere in the text; 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 the mouse.
* The iPhone automatically captalizes the first word after a period. (You can turn this feature off in Settings.)
* The iPhone has an English dictionary built in (minus the definitions). 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, great.
If you don’t—if you 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. 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.
Apple says that 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).
If you feel you’ve really made a mess of your custom dictionary, and the iPhone keeps suggesting ridiculous alternate words, you can reset the custom dictionary in Settings.
The suggestions given are for the current iPhone and may not consider to 3G phone, and depends on the build.
