Haloed shortcuts for your Apple

Your iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad share a similar virtual keyboard and therefore, you just have to master a common set of keyboard shortcuts to type a little faster on any these devices.

Tip #1 When you are typing a website URL in the address bar of the Safari browser, there's a special ".com" key in the keyboard that you can tap to quickly complete the web address. However, if the website that you are trying to reach doesn't end with a .com, you can still use that key. Just hold the key for a while and it will give you an option of other popular TLDs including .edu, .org and .net.

Tip #2 The numeric keyboard of the iPod /iPad shows the dollar ($) symbol in the default English keyboard. However, if you need to type the Pound or the Euro currency symbol, just hold the $ key and you'll see a list of alternative symbols.

Tip #3 If you are typing a line of text in, say, an email message, simply tap the space bar on the keyboard twice and it will automatically insert a dot (or period) followed by a space. The next alphabet that you type will be written in upper case without you having to press the Shift key.

Tip #4 Let's say you are typing a document and need to insert an email address in your text. Now the "@" symbol is not available on the default "ABC" keyboard so you'll first have to switch to the numeric keyboard (?123), tap "@" and then again switch to ABC mode.

That's like making three keystrokes for typing one key. To simplify, just press the ?123 key, slide the finger to reach the "@" key and then lift the finger to release the key. Amit writes a blog at www.labnol.org and tweets at http://twitter.com/labnol