Useful Mac Keyboard Shortcuts [Infographic]

One of the best ways to speed up your work on a computer and increase your productivity is to learn keyboard shortcuts. But learning shortcuts can be hard at first until it becomes muscle memory to use them. I recently created this infographic for my students and thought that it might also be useful to share with you, my blog readers.

This was my first infographic, and I did not want to overload my students, so I did not put on all the keyboard shortcuts I use, but tried to keep it to the most important global ones. My design skills are still a work in progress. I went with a basic primary color design because that is guaranteed to work well together and is often a good choice in K-12 education. 

It was created using Canva, the icons came from Flaticon, and I have licensed it under the creative commons, so feel free to download it and use it to help yourself or others (just give attribution back to this post).  I hope you find this helpful and that you remember to live better.

Using Dvorak keyboard layout in iOS 8

As most of you know I have been waiting for many a moon for a Dvorak keyboard on iOS. I think that layout is far better then QWERTY. As a side note I had to type on a QWERTY a couple days ago and my wrists quickly started hurting. If you have hand trouble you may want to consider switching over to Dvorak too.

Well, the long awaited day has finally arrived and a system wide Dvorak keyboard is here! In fact it has been possible ever since iOS 8 came out in September. So why the long wait in getting the good news to you? Two reasons. First, nobody immediately came out with a Dvorak keyboard, much to my chagrin. Second, by the team keyboards started coming out school had heated up considerably and I had to put the blog on the back burner for a month or so.

But now it is time. In the past couple months quite a few 3rd party keyboards with Dvorak layouts have slipped into the App Store. I will tell you about two of them here: Fleksy and Dvorak + Colemak Keyboards.


Fleksy
Price: 99¢
Stars: 2

Fleksy came out with the launch of iOS 8, but they did not support Dvorak as a layout right away, even though they already did on Android. Many people really like the Fleksy keyboard and say they can type quickly on it, I cannot. I find the way they do predictive typing to be odd and unwieldy. When they finally did ad the Dvorak layout I found that the keys did not line up as you would expect them to if you were use to typing on a regular Dvorak keyboard.

You can see this in the image below. The entire top row is not aligned where it should be, I soon found out that for some odd reason this is the case in many Dvorak layouts on iOS currently. This makes it hard to type because the keys are not where you would expect them to be.

Fleksy has lots of language layouts besides Dvorak, and it has a lot of customizability in terms of color and size. It also has special swipe gestures for certain functions. My main purpose here though is to review it as a Dvorak keyboard and so I won't go into everything that it does.

Fleksy requires you to give it "full access" under keyboard preferences in order to change to any layout other than English QWERTY. Usually keyboards need full access so that they can do predictive typing, the only problem is that in order to do that they have to collect your keystroke data. This has caused a lot of controversy around the internet because it could potentially be logging things like passwords and credit card numbers. Almost all 3rd party keyboards will ask for full access, it is not just Fleksy.


Dvorak + Colemak Keyboards
Price: 99¢
Stars: 4

Right off the bat this keyboard is looking better because the keys are in the correct locations for anyone use to a standard Dvorak layout. This allows there to be punctuation on the main keyboard, just where it should be. It shouldn't take long for those people to become familiar typing on this keyboard.

This keyboard does lack a lot of the bells and whistles that Fleksy and many other keyboards have, but that doesn't bother me. I don't need fancy color themes or size options I just need something functional.

One thing it is lacking though that is a problem though is an Emoji keyboard. I use emoji a lot when tweeting or texting, so this is a bit of deal breaker for me as far as everyday use goes.

Dvorak + Colemak Keyboards does no require full access to use, so your keystrokes are not logged. You will have to enable full access if you want keyboard clicks however because this is the only way that Apple will allow them to get access to the speakers.


Where I am now
Still using the standard Apple QWERTY onscreen keyboard. Why? Because, and this is nothing the app producers have control over, but 3rd party keyboards have been spotty across the board on iOS 8. Perhaps Apple was not really ready for them, but no matter which one you use it is likely to be buggy. They are sluggish and sometimes (often) will disappear completely. This makes it really unviable to use a 3rd party option as your default keyboard.

So for now, even though I was waiting for this day for so long, I am still primarily using the default keyboard. I hope that Apple will make significant improvements to 3rd party integration in the future, or better yet just make Dvorak part of the standard language package.

Well I hope you have found this post helpful, even if a little discouraging :( If you have found a keyboard (Dvorak or otherwise) that you like to use on iOS please let us know about it in the comments.


Disclosure: Archagon provided me with a free copy of Dvorak + Colemak keyboards to review. I never recommend anything on my blog though that I have not tried myself and that I approve of.

How to create keyboard shortcuts on an iPhone or iPad

Do you have to type the same thing over and over again? Maybe it's your username, maybe it's a question you get asked all the time, maybe it's your birth date, maybe it's a hashtag. Whatever it is, it can be super annoying to have to type out all the letters and words you need every time you need them. It is like having a typewriter all over again! (by the way there is an app for that if you really feel nostalgic about typewriters).

Fortunately there is a way to solve this problem and it is built directly into iOS, no app required. It is called keyboard shortcuts. Now this can be a little confusing because we normally think of keyboard shortcuts on the computer as being things like "cntrl-f" or "cmmd-z" to cause certain actions to occur. On iOS it is different. A keyboard short cut here means that you can type in a few code letters and iOS will ask if you want to replace them with some predetermined text.

Let's say that I have to type my consulting website's url all the time, and I don't want to do that anymore, so I make the shortcut bcom expand to the text bendnielsen.com. I show how to do this in the gif below:

Then every time I am typing and I need to put in my url I can save time by just typing out bcom, my iOS device will then suggest bendnielsen.com in the same way that it does with autocorrect. Isn't that awesome? Notice in the gif below how it follows the capitalization of what you actually type, so you want to watch out for that.

And that is really all their is to it. You can add as many of these as you want, and they can even be quite long, so you could put a whole email template in here if you chose and get it all typed with just a few letters. Be sure to make you shortcuts something that you wouldn't normally type naturally so you don't accidentally trigger them.

There you have it. Go create some keyboard shortcuts to make your life easier, and remember, live better.