Keyboard

Undo and redo typing quickly: Shake it, baby!

The new OS takes advantage of the accelerometer to let you do some quick, basic editing in any app that accepts text.

Simply shake the iPhone or iPod touch to undo the text you just entered. A pop-up appears, allowing you to confirm the action by hitting the Undo Typing button, or cancel it. If you decide you didn’t really want to undo the typing, shake the device again. This time, the pop-up will let you Redo Typing.

 You can have more than one keyboard layout active on your device at any time. So, for example, an international executive who did business in the U.K. and Russia could keep an English and Russian (Cyrillic) keyboard active and switch between them when composing notes and e-mail messages.

To activate different keyboards:

Safari’s keyboard has a “.com” button at the bottom, making it quick and easy to enter the tail end of a Web address. Hold the “.com” button down, and a pop-up appears, making it easy to enter .net, .edu, .org, etc. There’s a similar feature on the keyboard associated with Mail, but it’s not as obvious.

If you’re composing an e-mail to a friend or associate—something like: “John: Check out iPhoneLife.com”—when you get to the end of “iPhoneLife” press and hold down on the period key. A pop-up will appear, allowing you to select .com or other common Web address suffixes.

When you tap on the Web address bar in Safari, a keyboard pops up to allow you to enter the Web address. You don’t have to enter the prefix (“http://” or “www.”) or the suffix (“.com”) on a Web address. Safari will still find the age. You can also make the keyboard a little larger and easier to use.

If you want to enter a period into a note or in any application that accepts text, the standard way to do it is to tap on the “123” icon in the lower left corner of the keyboard. This brings up the numbers, symbols, and punctuation mark keyboard. Fortunately, there’s a quicker way to do it—simply hit the space bar twice quickly. It will enter a period and a blank space following it.