Filed under: iPod Family, Tips and tricks, iPhone, iPhone 101
iPhone 101: typing accented characters
Over at MacTips they have a nice tip which I figured would make for a good iPhone 101. If you find yourself needing to type an accented character (acutes, graves, umlauts, etc.), all you have to do is hold down the relevant key for a couple of seconds and voilà a nice pop-up menu will appear with the available choices. The trick works for a number of different characters besides the vowels (e.g. 'z' and '?') and seems to function as well on the iPod touch.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
eric said 1:22PM on 4-27-2008
Good undocumented tip. I learned this by accident months after purchasing my phone.
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connorcam said 1:24PM on 4-27-2008
Isn't this pretty much common knowledge by know?
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connorcam said 2:02PM on 4-27-2008
*now
Peter Zich said 6:33PM on 4-27-2008
Yeah I'm pretty sure it is.
Joe said 1:42PM on 4-27-2008
now if they did this with the ".com" button, so it displayed .org, .net, and .edu when you held it down... that would be terrific
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Andrew said 1:45PM on 4-27-2008
It does show the different national TLDs for the second language you have installed... on mine it says both .com and .no if you hold the button for a few seconds.
iPhoneGuy said 2:36PM on 4-27-2008
I can confirm that under 2.0 developer version (beta *f) lingering on .com give you a popup with .edu, .org, and .net.
Jakob Henner said 12:54PM on 4-28-2008
Mine says co.uk, but the unofficially Danish dictonary is based on the English.
But Andrew in the 2.0 Developer version are both Swedish, Danish and Norwegian available as languages and dictonaries. So I hope it means we will see the iPhone 3G in June. I'm just excited about the carrier, Telenor, Telia or TDC? (Tx3 :P) Or maybe 3?
BTW this is OOOLD news ;)
jbrader said 2:12PM on 4-27-2008
Wow, it even does ligatures. I didn't really want one before but I do now.
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LuminousNerd said 2:21PM on 4-27-2008
I could have sworn I read this on TUAW once before.
Oh well.
There's no such thing as "common knowledge", connorcam. May have been known to you for quite some time, but how are people going to find out if they don't accidentally stumble across it?
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Michael Kontaxis said 2:29PM on 4-27-2008
I think a great feature would be to hold .com down and have a similar menu pop up with .org .net .gov .edu etc.
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imatt said 4:22PM on 4-27-2008
another great feature would be reading the previous comments before posting essentially the same thing as #4...
Jarl said 2:35PM on 4-27-2008
As a matter of fact... this is an really annoying implementation of national characters (in Sweden ÅÄ and Ö). It slows down typing in my first language and it is the most annoying thing with my iPod Touch. I would rather see a solution where we could have these characters on the normal keyboard.
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Andrew said 3:18PM on 4-27-2008
Hi there neighbor! Like you I miss my alphabet's Scandinavian characters but I do see why Apple would not care to add them to the iPhone. After all that device is not for sale in Scandinavia anyway - but why is it missing on the iPod Touch?! Let us hope they wise up and realize we *need* those characters to write properly on both devices!
Greg said 3:04PM on 4-27-2008
Hey guys, another trick in the same category (and VERY undocumented :)
When you switch keyboards from letters to numbers, it's painful to press the "123" key, type the number and press on "ABC" to come back. Here is the trick : if you HOLD the "123" key and slide your finger to the wanted number, when you let go, you're BACK in the letter keyboard. Quite nice, isn't it ?
Enjoy !
G
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(01) said 4:18PM on 4-27-2008
I have slightly related question...when typing in a web address, if you hold down the ".com" key, it pops up what looks like an unpopulated list. Is there any way to add ".org, .edu, .gov, etc." to this space? It would be nice...
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Øivind said 4:26PM on 4-27-2008
I don't see why there's any need for the stupid lingering. Why can't that popup show up immediately? If the popup supported multi-touch instead of sliding, so that you could hold the popup with one finger and hit the letter you needed with a second finger, that would eliminate the need for the lingering.
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ludwigschubert said 4:30PM on 4-27-2008
Actually one of the coolest things about the autocorrection of the iPhone for me is that I do not have to type any umlauts or accents as the correction handles this for me.
Even the example that comes with this article: I type voilà only once, then when I type voila it autocorrects to voilà.
Same works for almost any German word with umlauts in it, so I'm quite content with the keyboard, though it might be different for Scandinavian characters.
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Jarl said 1:46AM on 4-28-2008
Well, I still don't think that autocorrection is the answer. I belive that Ä and Ö is used much more in swedish than in german so we have for example: här (here), har (have), and hår (hair). And a much more funny (or potential dangerous) example is: höra (hear) and hora (whore). It might cause some interesting mistakes:)
Tony said 5:02PM on 4-27-2008
Is there a trick to do caps lock? It sucks typing abbreviations when you've got to go back to shift each time.
You'd think that extrapolating from the hold down A to get Ä you'd hold down shift, but that doesn't work.
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