[Macworld]

Post your comments for Seven iPad keyboard tricks here

[phdtop]

Wow! Cool keyboard tricks (#7)! When undocked, you can also drag somehow to cause the keyboard to split without having to go back to the keyboard popup.

BTW, the transcript says to tap "the keyboard button in the lower left", and on my iPad it's the lower right. (I haven't checked the video itself to see if this is a mistake in the original or just the transcription.)

[Dan Miller]

Right you are, and right it is. Thanks for catching that.

[flybynight]

I haven't found the interrobang on the iOS keyboard yet. Has anyone else‽

[rocketwire]

Great tips! Thank you.

Even faster than splitting the keyboard from the bottom menu, you can swipe your thumbs in opposing directions (one left and the other right). Once you do it, you will see how intuitive it is. The same applies to putting it back together.

Also you can get special characters by setting up language-specific keyboards in the keyboard section of the General Settings. This is best option if you plan on typing more than a few words in another language.

[gregedwards69]

#8. The Emoji keyboard set in the keyboard preferences 'international keyboards. Great for all you emoticon loving kids.

[hrpanjwani]

On my wish list: for the email field make the @ key behave in a similar fashion. Hold down on @ and you get @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and other commonly used email providers.

[hrpanjwani]

 gregedwards69, on 10 May 2012 - 08:28 AM, said:

#8. The Emoji keyboard set in the keyboard preferences 'international keyboards. Great for all you emoticon loving kids.

yup i use that.

[HandyMac]

As a new iPad owner, I found this article helpful. One point, however, is not quite right: There is no dash on the numeric keyboard; there is a hyphen. When I press and hold the hyphen, I get a choice of en-dash, em-dash, or bullet. When I swipe up on the hyphen, I get an en-dash (-), not an em-dash (--). (I'll be interested to see if these two dashes will appear correctly in the post; I don't usually use them on the 'Net because much of it is still limited to ASCII. Example: the above post by "flybynight".)

[btb83]

It's worth mentioning that 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 work on the iPhone as well.

2 and 7 do not (for me, at least, on ios 5.1.1)

2 is a new one for me - but it appears to be closely related to 1. If you swipe up, you see the same choices of additional letters that you get with a press and hold, but without the "original" key as a choice. So ¢ being right above $, it's easy to hit in a swipe motion; the other choices not so much.

6 is also new to me, usually just hit the space bar (bigger target than ABC) to switch back to the letter keyboard.

But what I would like is a way to STAY on the number/symbol keyboard and NOT have the space bar take you back to the ABC keyboard. If I'm listing numbers separated by a space or comma, it's annoying to be constantly kicked back to the ABC keyboard.

[HandyMac]

 HandyMac, on 10 May 2012 - 09:42 AM, said:

I'll be interested to see if these two dashes will appear correctly in the post....

Well, guess not. The two (en-dash & em-dash) appeared correctly in the comment box as I wrote it, but now appear on the page as a hyphen and double-hyphen (the ASCII version of the "dash", as I learned when I learned to type 50 years ago). Typography on the Web is a mess; Macworld's comment system still needs some smartening-up.

[quakerotis]

These are all really great tips and I'll use them all the time. I love me some keyboard shortcuts.
Additionally, does anyone know how to get to the .COM key after keyboard use? For me, it only shows when the keyboard first appears.

[Gabep]

Cool tricks. Thanks! Some of these work on my iPhone 3GS too.

[godofbiscuits0f7x]

If you have multiple keyboards in place (like for international keyboards) and the globe key is present, you don't had to cycle through the set to get back to English (or whatever your main keyboard is). Holding it down will give you a popup of all the keyboards in use and you can select whatever keyboard you want to use next.