Your iPad is a powerful computer, and becomes even more so if you attach a keyboard to it. Fortunately, it’s easy. The only complication is there are a bunch of different options.
Let’s go through the possibilities so you can pick the one that’s best for you.
It’s pretty easy to type the Apple logo on any of your Apple devices, although it’s easier on some (like the Mac) than on others (like Apple TV). Below is a quick list that lays out exactly how to type the Apple logo on any Apple device.
Cultured Code’s lovely to-do app Things just got a massive update on iOS, and set the standard for iPad keyboard support at the same time. Now you can control pretty much anything from the keyboard, in a way that’s intuitive and useful, and not just there for power-nerds.
Also — finally — this update lets you drag tasks onto the Things sidebar to add them to your lists.
Finding emoji on the iPhone and iPad is easy — you just tap the little emoji key in the corner of your keyboard, and there they are. Emoji are fully supported on the Mac, too, but where do you find them? If you don’t already know, then this trick is going to blow your mind, because it’s just as easy to get to the emoji panel on the Mac as it is on the iPhone.
The iPad keyboard can quickly enter over a hundred characters, if you know all the tricks. A new video from Apple shows how to type numbers without switching keyboards. It also demonstrates how to access letters with accents. Plus, it shows how to use the keyboard as a trackpad.
One of the iPad’s handiest features is its keyboard-shortcut cheatsheet. Whenever you have a USB or Bluetooth keyboard attached to your iPad, just hold down the Command key and wait for a second. An overlay will pop up showing you all the keyboard shortcuts available for the current app.
Did you ever wish you could do the same with the Mac? After all, you always have a keyboard connected the Mac, so a cheatsheet overlay should be even more useful. Then you need CheatSheet, an app that does exactly that.
Somewhere after the launch of iOS 11, Apple tweaked Spotlight search to be way more useful. Now, when you search for a person, you can trigger a sub-search that lets you find everything you have on them, from emails, to iMessages, to their contact details, through WhatsApp messages, to calendar events. Anywhere that your selected contact exists on your iPhone or iPad will show up in the list.
And then, you can narrow the results with a sub search.
Type to Siri isn’t just for iOS 11. You can also turn on this super-useful feature on your Mac if it’s running macOS High Sierra. Type to Siri lets you do everything you can with normal Siri — call people, send iMessages, look stuff up on the web, do math, set reminders, and so on — only you type the command into a box instead of saying it. Type to Siri is classified as an accessibility feature, but it’s useful for anyone who works in a busy office, or just feels like a dork when they talk to their Mac.
iOS 11 is Apple’s most keyboard-friendly version of its mobile software yet, but that doesn’t mean you have to hook up an external keyboard to use its best new keyboard-centric features. Today we’ll look at Type to Siri, which can be used whenever you’d usually talk to your favorite digital assistant just by tapping on the usual on-screen keyboard.
Who doesn’t love emoji? People with bad eyesight, that’s who. Everyone else, everyone everywhere, loves the little pictures of medals, flags, headphones, eggplants, and feces. What we don’t like is finding them by swiping around the keyboard section of an iPhone screen. In some ways it’s a metaphor for human existence. We love to manipulate the meaning of symbols through context and juxtaposition, the way a standup comic does, but we’re too lazy to spend the time to do it properly.
Happily for the future of the human race, there are shortcuts to great emoji if you’re using iOS. Let’s take a look.
Text snippets are one of the most useful “unknown” features on Mac and iOS. They let you type a few letters, and have them expand into a whole word, sentence or paragraph. You can use them to type, say, aadd and have it turn into your office address, for example. Or you might set up a shortcut to generate a symbol usually hidden on the iOS keyboard: xx to type a #, for example.
Until now, though, Apple’s Text Replacement function proved a royal pain to use. It never synced properly between devices, and it didn’t support multiple-line snippets. But in an update last week, Apple fixed both those problems.
If you have small hands, or a big-screen iPhone, or both, then you may love the new one-handed keyboard in iOS 11. It’s a simple software tweak that squishes the on-screen keyboard horizontally, and slides it to the left or right, so you can more easily reach all the keys with a thumb.
This is great news for folks who like to walk along the street sipping coffee and texting, instead of looking where they’re going. It’s also neat for people trying to get a baby to sleep, so they can tweet about it as they bob the baby into slumber on their hip.
If you use emojis, the iOS keyboard is fantastic. It suggests emojis for you as you type words, and you can insert them into your messages with a tap. But what about the Mac? How can you add emojis with the keyboard on the desktop? And how can you force iOS to remember shortcuts for your favorite emoji on the iPhone and iPad? The answer to both is Text Replacement, which is built into both macOS and iOS.
One of the neatest tricks built into the Mac, and now into iOS, is to print to PDF. In short, anything that can be printed can also be saved as a PDF. But doing so on the Mac means using the mouse to click a little drop-down picker in the print dialog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tap Command-P — the keyboard shortcut for printing — twice instead?
iOS 11 has added some great new features to the humble screenshot tool. You can quickly view a new screenshot without a trip to the Photos app first, and you can edit and mark it up before saving it. By adding some powerful pro-level features to screenshot markup, Apple has –somewhat ironically — made them way more useful and accessible for everyone.
If your Mac is sick, the first step is to restart it. But did you know that there are several tricks you can perform while your Mac is starting up?
Many of these are advanced Mac diagnostic tools, which shouldn’t be used unless you really know what you’re doing. But some not-so-secret startup keyboard combos will remove a stuck disk (if your Mac is old enough to even have a disk inside), let you boot your Mac from a USB drive, or to turn your entire computer into one big storage disk to connect to another computer.
You probably spend a lot of time in the macOS Finder. Much of it is likely spent pointing and clicking, using the trackpad pointer to duplicate files, or to click back to the folder you were in a moment ago.
But, like most Mac apps, the Finder offers a ton of useful keyboard shortcuts — to create new folders, navigate files and change what you see in the Finder window. If you learn a couple of them, you can spend a lot less time dithering with your mouse. You will also look like a cool TV or movie hacker if you click on the keyboard instead.
Today, we’ll look at the most useful day-to-day Finder keyboard shortcuts.
The nice thing about an on-screen keyboard is that you can change how it works with a software update. That’s exactly what has happened in iOS 11. Now, the iPad keyboard uses something called Key Flicks to give fast access to double the number of keys, without changing the layout or making anything smaller. It does this by introducing a new gesture to access all those extra characters, and you’ll never have to press the 123 key.
iOS 11 has gotten a big upgrade to its QuickView video player, the one that takes care of videos playing in apps, on web sites, and so on. Previously you only got a basic video scrubber, a volume slider, and a play button. Now, you can not only access subtitles and AirPlay right from the video screen, but you can control pretty much everything in the new iOS 11 video player with a keyboard.
The iPad might be designed for touch, but it’s also surprisingly good with an external hardware keyboard, and includes excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, it shares many keyboard shortcuts with the Mac, so if you have these already ingrained in your muscle-memory, they’ll carry right across. Let’s take a look at five of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for the iPad (and iPhone).