Keyboard Shortcuts in iOS
iOS 5 has been out for a while, but it seems most people missed out one of my favorite new features. Buried in your settings are your Keyboard Shortcuts. If you’re familiar with TextExpander, this is a light version of that. Otherwise, it’s a simple way to type a couple of characters which are then converted into a larger, harder to type string. Even though typing on an iOS device works, this streamlines some tedious typing.
The Setup
First, you need to find the menu. Open Settings, go to General, then Keyboard and scroll to the bottom. You’ll notice a default one, which I deleted. Click the Add New Shortcut… button at the bottom. You’re presented with two options: Phrase and Shortcut. Phrase is the full, final text you want to be displayed. Shortcut is the short phrase that you want converted.
Below is what I use. I prepend an “s” for “Stephen”:
- Phrase: my email address, Shortcut: se-
- Phrase: my phone number, Shortcut: sp-
- Phrase: my home address, Shortcut: sa-
Now, when you’re in Safari and you need to submit your phone number or email address, you just type se- and the autocorrect field comes up with the full email address.
A Bonus
As a bonus, if you leave the Shortcut field blank, the word in Phrase will be considered spelled correctly. This eliminates the “ducking” problem, if you know what I mean.
The Down Side
There are a couple down sides to Apple’s implementation.
- Your shortcuts are not portable. If you have an iPhone and an iPad, you have to put the shortcuts into each device separately. Maybe this will be fixed with iCloud at some point.
- You can’t put line breaks in to your Phrase. This means that my address is all on one line.
