One of the weird things about the Apple iPad is that it doesn’t come with an electronic version of its manual installed on its first page of apps. You have to actually search the Apple web site to find it. Given the ease of use of the iPad, many people won’t read that manual but I have discovered that there are useful little tips tricks hidden in that manual or published on sites like ipadforums.net.
Here are some of the things that I have learned and find useful enough to stow away on this site.
- You get better at cursor placement with practice. It is very frustrating at first, though. One hint is to pause over where you’re going. Leave your finger in place until the magnifying glass appears, then drag the cursor into position letter by letter. The iPad bumps the cursor to the front or back of the word when you tap – only the magnifying glass can put you in the middle of a word. Practicing pausing, double taps, and single taps. Especially try pausing over all the keyboard characters, as most have multiple uses. The E key actually gives you ë, é, e, è, ê, ē, ę, and ė, for example.
- When editing text tapping once and holding gives you the magnifying glass. Another quick selection or editing tool is to double tap then long hold. Once you get the right combo you will notice instead of a round magnifying glass, you get a rectangular magnified text box that you can then drag for more specific word groups or sentences for copying, pasting or replacing.
- If a window on a web site is too small to show all of the text it contains, you can use two fingers to scroll inside that window.
- Tap the title bar at the top of the screen to scroll back up to the top.
- By default the dock has four icons but it can hold six.
I’ll add new stuff as I stumble across it. Use the comments function to add your own piece of wisdom.