From the course: iOS 17: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

iPadOS-only keyboard features

From the course: iOS 17: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

iPadOS-only keyboard features

“

- [Instructor] So far, everything we've seen in this chapter about working with text works on both iPhones and iPads, but there are also features that are available only on the iPad. For example, we saw earlier that in addition to placing the cursor anywhere in your text by dragging it around, you can also hold your finger on the space bar for a second to go into Track Pad mode, and this lets you see the cursor move around on the text itself, which can make it easier to place since your finger isn't in the way. And that's available on both iPhones and iPads. But on the iPad, you can also move the cursor by placing two fingers anywhere on the screen and dragging around. Or you can also select text by placing two fingers anywhere on the screen and pausing for a second. The selection cursor will appear, letting you then drag to select text. If you need to make adjustments to either selection handle, you can do so by dragging them directly, like you can on the iPhone. Now on iPads, you also have a keyboard feature called Key Flick which is designed to make typing faster when using the onscreen keyboard. Notice on the keyboard, we see smaller numbers and special characters at the top of almost every key here. Now you can always get to the numbers and characters by tapping the Number and Characters button down here, but with key flicks on the iPad, to type out any of these characters, you just have to swipe or flick down on the corresponding letter key. So for example, I'll just go down a couple lines here. And I'll type, Please contact me at. And then if I need to enter a phone number of, let's say, 555-1243, I just flick down on the letter T three times. Then the X key to get the dash, and then Q-W-E-R. It takes a little getting used to, but once you familiarize yourself with the location of the characters you use most frequently, you'll find this is much faster than switching over to the dedicated numbers and characters keyboard. Now key flick is on by default, but if you don't see the key flicks characters on your keyboard, you can go into Settings to General, Keyboard, and here, make sure Enable Key Flicks is turned on. Again, key flicks is an iPad only feature and is available on every iPad with the exception of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which has a large enough screen to accommodate the full size keyboard with numeric keys in the top row. But if you have any other iPad running iPadOS 16, you have the key flicks feature. And after getting used to it, you should find typing on your iPad to be much quicker. Now while we're in the Settings here, notice one of the other options here is Slide on Floating Keyboard to Type. This refers to the Quick Path feature we looked at earlier in this chapter, but you might have noticed that Quick Path doesn't work on the iPad's full-size keyboard But the keyboard in iPadOS has a mini mode you can access by pinching two fingers together on top of the keyboard. This gives us this iPhone-sized mini keyboard, and you can drag it anywhere on screen using the handle at the bottom. This is useful if you want to type with one finger. For example, if I'm holding my iPad in both hands, I can drag the keyboard to the lower right to type with my right thumb. And you can also use the Quick Path mode since we saw that the Slide on Floating Keyboard to Type option in Settings is on by default. And to expand to the full size keyboard again, just pinch out with two fingers on the keyboard. Okay, so there you have several iPad-only keyboard and typing features.

Contents