Blog archive: January 2010

Your iPhone's virtual keyboard is a helpful little fella: It appears when you need it and disappears when you don't; it suggests and corrects words as you type them; and it even adds punctuation on your behalf.

One thing it doesn't do very well, however, is help you type a string of capital letters.

This operation requires you to tap the Shift key before pressing every single letter in the word you want to capitalise. Which can be a real pain when you want to enter acronyms and abbreviations like NASA, SNAFU and USA. Or, if you just like SHOUTING at people!

What you might not know, however, is that the iPhone, does in fact, have a hidden Caps Lock feature. You just need to enable it. Here's how...

Browsing lengthy web pages on your iPhone is a bit like mountain biking - it's a lot easier to go down, than it is to go up.

Take a lengthy discussion board thread, for example. Scrolling down the page is fine. But when you reach the bottom, you find yourself faced with the RSI-inducing prospect of having to flick your way back up to the top.

Unless you know the "tap the top" trick, that is...

On the iPhone's virtual keyboard, the punctuation and alphabet keys appear on two different keyboard layouts. That's a real pain, because each time you want to type, say, a comma, you need to perform an awkward three-step operation: First you need to tap the Punctuation key...then the comma key...and finally, either the ABC key or the Space bar, to return to the main keyboard layout. Which is just excruciating if you do a lot of typing on your phone.

Fortunately, there's a secret way of producing such punctuation marks that involves nothing more than a single finger gesture. Allow us to explain...

As any iPhone aficionado will tell you, the iPhone's camera isn't much kop. There's no flash, zoom, red-eye reduction, image stabiliser, editing capabilities...frankly, there's not much of anything. As a result, it can be difficult to take a decent photo. Here's a quick tip for taking a sharper shot though...

Imagine you're the first person to stumble across a particular iPhone shortcut. Fame amongst the Mac fanboys awaits...but only if you can show them how to reproduce it. And what better way of doing so than by posting step-by-step illustrations on your blog. Hang on a minute though. How are you going to get these illustrations? How can you snap images of your iPhone's screen?

For the first year of the iPhone's existence, this simply wasn't possible. If you wanted to snap the screen, you had to use an expensive camera or invalidate your iPhone's warranty by installing someone else's hacked-together attempt at a screen capture program. All that changed with the arrival of Apple's iPhone 2.0 software however, so you can now capture the screen and have the resulting image added directly to your iPhone's Camera Roll. Here's how...

The iPhone is the best mobile phone the world has ever seen. It really is that simple. Unlike its competitors, it presents email nicely, voicemail intelligently and web pages properly - that is, in a proper fully-functioning web browser, with their original design and layout intact. It also has a tilt sensor, proximity sensor, light sensor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an incredible multi-touch screen that makes using it a delight. The latest model even includes a compass (opening up all manner of weird and wonderful Augmented Reality possibilities), video recording capabilities and voice control.

All this hi-tech wizardry makes the iPhone more than just a phone - it's an iPod, camera, camcorder, calendar, address book, calculator, alarm clock, stopwatch, stock tracker, map, notepad, photo album and weather forecaster. It can even double as a torch or, with its screen turned off, a mirror, in times of crisis.

Start using the App Store and it becomes a fully-fledged computer. Thanks to the thousands of free or cheap programs found therein, you can turn it into a musical instrument, recipe book, time tracker, remote control, translator, tip calculator, e-Book reader, and more. Not to mention, a portable games system, of course!

Yet, you wouldn't know any of this from reading the ruddy manual. Why? Because there isn't one. When you buy a new iPhone, all you get is a wafer-thin fold-out leaflet that explains little more than how to charge it up and turn it on; and a pointer to a PDF document that explains the basics of its operation, but nothing about the various hacks, tricks, shortcuts and workarounds that make using it fun.

"Touchy Tips" is our attempt to put this right. So starting on Monday, we'll be posting ten video tips for getting the most out of your iPhone. And as you'd expect from us, each one will not only be informative, but fun - so subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified as soon as each is published.

Oh, and look out for Peter the Polar Bear and Johnny the Jackdaw!