Monday, July 28th, 2008...11:07 am
#81: Learn To Text With Your Thumbs
Old people behavior of which I am guilty: Holding your phone at arm’s length (so you can read the numbers and letters, natch!) and then typing with your index finger.
No no no no. You’ve got to pretend your index finger doesn’t even exist. Forget the middle, ring, and pinky fingers too.
The young way to dial your phone or to text or type on your BlackBerry or iPhone is with your thumbs. Yes, all with your thumbs.
There are online guides to thumb-typing, like this one by Mark Rejhon. Following this method would probably work, but I’m too impatient and probably even too old to read past step 2 in the directions.
Instead, I’ve been entertaining myself by typing away as fast as I can (not fast) with my thumbs on my new iPhone (yes! I’m so cool!) and then chuckling over what mistakes I make and how the iPhone corrects them. Except sometimes the corrections are funnier than the mistakes.
The other night I was trying to type “there’s no fucking way….” except what showed up on the screen was “there’s no ducking way…..”
So I typed it again, but this time with my index finger, checking old people-style to make sure I was hitting the right keys. That’s when I saw that it was the iPhone that was automatically changing my fucking to ducking. Not so cool!
Here’s a demonstration of iPhone thumb-typing, extolling the virtues of the autocorrect feature. But this guy is obviously not telling the whole ducking story:
, Apple
hey there, I can’t find your contact information but your layout design looked rearranged on firefox and opera. Anyways, i just suscribd to your rss.
As someone who’s not yet totally old, I can share how to get your fucking iphone to type the fucking word you want rather than autofilling with “duck” or “shiv” or what have you:
Enter the forbidden word in your address book as the name of a(n imaginary) contact. Your text predictor will recognize the “name” and allow it.
I have it on authority this works for txting; I don’t know how it works for other apps, as I still use one of those old-fangled phones that flips open. I will probably get a smartphone around the same time all the young folks start twittering to each other via neural implants.
[…] iPhone faster than I do. Currently, I definitely show my age, as Pamela Redmond Satran, author of How Not to Act Old, explains: “Old people behavior of which I am guilty: Holding your phone at arm’s length […]