Steve Dotto here.
I’m glad you’re joining us today.
Today’s topic is all for the iPhone users out there.
Now anybody who follows this channel knows that I’m a big fan of Apple’s Siri, their
voice recognition tool.
I use it wherever possible because one thing I am not a fan of is an onscreen keyboard
and it’s not just an Apple thing.
If you have an onscreen keyboard where I have to hunt and peck and use my thumbs and my
fingers to type out a message, I tend to find that I am somewhat challenged.
I miss my old Blackberry.
I actually miss the old Blackberry and that keyboard they had which was just awesome.
But that ship has sailed, has it not?
Now we’ve got these great phones that have these screens but if you’re in a noisy environment
of you’re in a place where your message should be a little bit more private, Siri
and voice recognition doesn’t always work.
So it behooves us to learn to master the software keyboard and in the Apple world, that means
that we should learn to use some of the different keyboard tips and tricks that Apple has built
in.
Do you know something?
Apple has not done a great job of communicating all of these tools to us so it falls onto
my shoulders to show you some better ways to do things.
Now the one thing that they’ve incorporate into the iOS, I think starting in iOS 5, is
they’ve incorporate shortcuts very similar to the keyboard macros that we use in TextExpander.
I’ve done a great video on TextExpander.
You should watch it.
It’s an awesome video if you are a Mac user because it allows me to do keyboard shortcuts
for long text strings and just really increases my personal productivity.
Apple has actually built that into the operating system almost in a vacuum.
Nobody seems to know about it and it’s kind of buried deep in the system.
Let me show you how to get to it.
You get to the keyboard shortcuts in order to create these little macros by going into
the General tab under your Settings and there you scroll down until you find Keyboard.
You go into Keyboard.
You have to make sure that the shortcut button is turned on and once that’s turned on,
you can scroll down to the very bottom there and you can see the shortcuts that I’ve
installed here.
I’ve only put three in because I’m just kind of getting it set up but you can add
a new shortcut in here.
Now this is uber cool.
I’ll make it really easy.
I’m just going to make it my web address.
Let’s say that it’s the sort of thing that I want to have as a keyboard shortcut
so that I don’t have to type it in multiple times.
“Doottotech,” there we go.
As you see me struggling with this, this is why I don’t like to use the keyboard because
it takes me forever and I can’t multitask when I’m using it.
So I’ve created the address.
I want to put in www.Dottotech.com.
Now I’m looking for a shortcut, something that is not a common string of characters
I can use.
Typically speaking in TextExpander when we use it, we put a hashtag or a pound before
it but I’m just going to use a double first letter, uurl, because that will work.
It’ll be something that I can remember.
Then I save that.
Then you see that here on the list, now we have “uurl” and it’s got my web address
attached to it.
So let’s take a look at how that works.
I’m just going to go into Notepad here, into the little note tool and there as I’m
say typing a note to somebody in email or in chat—it doesn’t matter—if I type
“uurl,” what it does is it comes up with that text string and all I have to do is hit
the spacebar and it puts it in.
You can do this for all sorts of things.
You can do it for your phone number.
You can do it for messages like BRB, the little shorthand codes that we would have been using
in text before, it will expand it out.
I like to finish my correspondence with family members by reminding them that I love them
so I put “ilu” and see?
I don’t have to type in “I love you.”
I can just put it in at the end.
They don’t know I’m not making a big effort to tell them that I love them but it’s nice
to add to the end of every message.
It makes everybody feel good.
So you can add your own sorts of things.
While we’re on the keyboard, they’ve also incorporated a whole bunch of extra things
into the keyboard to help us on some of those more challenging situations, for example accents.
We’ve all got friends now 0with names with all sorts of accents in them.
That’s the nature of globalization.
So if you’ve got somebody that has those funny little things on the letter N, look
you just press and hold on any key and it will pop out any keyboard options.
Now every key on the keyboard doesn’t have that capability but some do.
The letter I, it’s got all of the different variations of the letter I that are in different
alphabets, or A will have them as well, see?
All of the different A’s are available to us.
If we go into special characters, into things like the numbers, go into currency, go into
the dollar sign and there we’ve got all the different major currencies.
In the period, there it is, we’ve got different types of periods.
I love the dashes because you get the em dash.
You get those different lengths of dashes that you can incorporate as well.
If you want to use it, you can just slide over to it and you use it.
That gives you some great control over all those different aspects.
Now while I’m at that, while I’m talking about that—I know what I want to show you—I
want to show you also when you’re going into a web browser and you’re typing in
a web address into anything, if you’re going into any web address when you hit the period
button, sometimes you see “.com” in the bottom depending on how it’s set up.
But regardless when you’re in any web-enabled app, if you hit the period key it brings up
all of the short keys or short commands for the major top level domains, .com, .org, .ca,
.net, .edu.
That helps you when you’re filling in email addresses as well.
Spending a little bit time to master some of these little subtle tools in our mobility
devices is really the difference between us feeling that we’re in charge of the technology
and the technology’s in charge of us.
I don’t live in fear of having to type of having to type out an email once I’ve mastered
the Apple keyboard.
Before when I had to kind of peck for every single thing, it was a challenge but now I
know almost no instance is going to come along that I don’t understand where I need to
be on the keyboard in order to communicate and using things like these shortcuts, I can
also increase my communication vocabulary dramatically and the ease of use with which
I can send it.
Does that make sense?
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this video and found it useful today.
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journey.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks so much for spending time with me today.