shortcuts - page 4

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.

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.

Safari on the Mac is almost entirely controllable by the keyboard. You can open tabs, navigate forms on the page, and search through pages. And even if there’s no built-in shortcut, the Mac lets you add custom shortcuts to any menu item. The iPad isn’t quite so well-served, but you’d be surprised at just how many keyboard shortcuts there are for Safari on the iPad. In fact, there are so many great shortcuts that you may even forget you’re not using a Mac. Let’s take a look.

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).

After throttling our video quality automatically to ensure we didn’t burn through our data in two episodes of Breaking Bad, Netflix is finally giving users control over the video quality they get when using a data connection.

The latest version of its iOS app adds four playback options — plus handy 3D Touch shortcuts that make it faster to access content from the home screen.

When you’re binge-watching a show like Walking Dead or Person of Interest on Netflix, you may at times need to get up for a snack or bathroom break (or both).

Fumbling around for the mouse to bring up the playback overlay is fine, but using the keyboard to pause your streaming media is much faster. Here are five hidden keyboard shortcuts that will put you in charge of your Netflix experience.

If you’re one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a big, beautiful iPad Pro, you might be surprised that many of the same OS X keyboard shortcuts, like the ones for cut, paste, find, etc., are available right on your new giant laptop replacement.

The iPad Pro keyboard has a Command key on it, as do several third-party keyboards.

If you’re already a Mac user (and you should be), you’ll feel right at home when you need to create a new document in Pages, make your text bold or italic, or even show the word count in a document. Here are several key combinations you can use right out of the box.

Searching for stuff is a big part of what we do on our computers, right? I know that I use Google daily for searching, both for topical information as well as just plain old “where is that website” search. Both Safari and Chrome search right from the address bar, and Spotlight has been in the upper right corner of Mac OS X for several iterations now.

There’s a faster way to access your preferred search engine and Spotlight, however, using only your keyboard.

Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.

I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.

But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.

So, one of the great things that iOS introduced back in iOS 6 was the ability to synchronize your text shortcuts across devices.

So, for example, if you set up “@@” on your iPhone to expand to your email address, that same shortcut would show up on your iPad.

With OS X Mavericks, this ability comes full circle to your Mac, letting all iCloud-synced devices have the same text shortcuts on them.

Pocket brought us a terrific Mac app back in October, and just over a month on, it’s already back with a new update. This one introduces a nice stack of new features, including native Twitter and Facebook support for those running OS X Mountain Lion, new keyboard shortcuts, better Evernote sharing, and more.

Power users know that the more you can keep your hands on the keyboard, the faster you can get things done on your Mac. That’s the reason keyboard shortcuts exist, like Command-C to copy text, or Shift-Command-3 to take a screenshot. It’s perfectly acceptable to move your mouse to select the command from a menu, of course, but the keyboard shortcuts are just faster.

Spotlight, like most other OS X apps, has several shortcuts that can help you get around much more quickly.

After being introduced in iOS 5, keyboard shortcuts is a feature I could no longer live without on my iOS device. I use it for all kinds of things, including email addresses and usernames, so that I never have to type out the full thing 30 times a day. There is one thing the feature has been lacking, though, and that’s the ability to sync your keyboard shortcuts across all your iOS devices.

That is until now; the feature was finally added to iOS 6, which was released to the public yesterday.

One of the 200 new features touted by Apple for OS X Mountain Lion is a boon to those of us who have to type the same text string or phrase over and over, including email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and the like. It’s also a great way for people with motor disabilities to be able to type at a much faster rate than otherwise. Here’s how to set it up.

 Tired of typing in your email address to login to websites on your iPhone? I know I am. Heck, even typing on the iPad can get to be a pain, with every site LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the like asking for log in credentials – most of them wanting my email address or login name. Or, heck, password. You can use the iPhone autofill email address feature to make this process seamless.

Just like changing the default “OMW” text message auto-correct, here’s another idea on making the most of your iPhone time, rather than spending it typing in your email address, password, or street address.

Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.

TextExpander from Smile Software is a wonderful tool that turns text strings and images into tiny little shortcuts, saving you time and effort every time you type. It’s a little like the Shortcuts feature Apple built into iOS 5, but a million times better. You can currently find it in the Mac App Store, but we’d advise you not to buy it there.

Why? Because the Mac App Store version is the older version 3.4.2 release, and Smile Software has chosen to depart Apple’s marketplace for version 4.0. It turns out that the Cupertino company’s strict sandboxing rules, which went into effect on June 1, don’t allow some of TextExpander’s core features.

We’re super excited for iOS 6. Although it isn’t the complete iOS overhaul many users were hoping for, it does deliver a whole host of new features — like a new Maps app, user interface enhancements, improvements to stock apps, and Siri support on iPad — that we’re certainly looking forward to.

However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that iOS 6 still has some things missing. Things we’ve been waiting for for some time. Here are seven of them.

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Newer Macs, both portable and desktop, come with keyboards that have shortcut keys on the top row, where the F keys are. These F keys allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the display, control iTunes playback, and raise and lower the volume.

You may also know that these features have associated preference panes in System Preferences as well. You can find them by opening System Preferences, which can be found in the Applications folder. Then you can click on the specific Preference pane you need, like the one for brightness or Mission Control. There’s also a way to get directly to these preference panes with a keyboard shortcut.

You know how in many Google web apps you can just press CMD-? to bring up an overlay containing all the keyboard shortcuts available? (you did know that, right?) Well, now you can do the same with any app on your Mac using the sweet and simple CheatSheet, a free app with this one single purpose.

Cydia is home to one too many lock screen tweaks. There are classic packages like LockInfo that enhance the iOS lock screen with all kinds of handy shortcuts and features, but there’s also tweaks like LockLauncher that are messy and ugly. With that said, FastLock is a refreshingly simple take on lock screen shortcuts for jailbroken iPhones.

Look, I know some folks like the auto-expand of omw to “On My Way!,” but honestly? I’m rarely that enthusiastic when sending a text about my plans to head over to a buddy’s house. Just sayin’. If this bugs you as well, here’s the way to fix it, as well as add others to your texting repertoire.

Designer extraordinaire Jeff Broderick has created yet another tool for enhancing your productivity on your iOS devices. QuickContact is a beautiful web app that allows you to create app icons for quickly initiating calls or messages from your Home screen.

None of us enjoy typing out our email address, especially if we have to do it a number of times a day on an iOS device. But thanks to the new Shortcuts feature in iOS 5, we don’t have to. Here’s how to setup a shortcut that will save you from typing out your email address forever!

Multiple tricks for gaining quick access to settings toggles on the iPhone’s Home screen have been making the news lately, and many rejoiced that such a thing could be accomplished without needing to jailbreak.

In the iOS 5.1 beta, it’s been discovered that Apple has blocked access to these settings shortcuts. How lame!