Daniel Hruska OS X has long supported defining custom shortcuts for selected text. This means that if you often need to write the same word combination or a combination of non-traditional characters, you will choose your own shortcut for it, saving you hundreds of unnecessary keystrokes and also your precious time. Its sixth version brought the same function to iOS, but Mavericks and iOS 7 can sync these shortcuts to all your Apple devices thanks to iCloud.
Where do you find your shortcuts?
- OS X: System Preferences > Keyboard > Text tab
- iOS: Settings > General > Keyboard
Adding shortcuts itself is already very simple, however Apple has brought a bit of confusion to the tooltips on OS X and iOS. On a Mac in the left column Replace you enter the abbreviation and in the right column Za required text. In iOS, first in the box Phrase you enter the desired text and into the box Abbreviation intuitively shorthand.
What can be abbreviations? Basically anything. However, it is certainly a good idea to choose an abbreviation so that it does not appear in real words. If I'm going to overdo it, it's pointless to choose the abbreviation "a" for some text, since the vast majority of the time you'd want to use "a" as a conjunction.
When typing a shortcut, a small menu pops up with a sample of the replaced text. If you continue to write, the abbreviation is replaced by this text. However, if you don't want to use the shortcut, click the cross (or press ESC on a Mac). In order not to click on this cross often, it is advisable to define appropriate shortcuts.
I only encountered one problem with syncing, and that was when I changed the shortcut on the iPhone. It remained unchanged on the Mac, then finally changed itself in System Preferences, but I still had to type it over and over again. After about a few days everything started working fine. I don't know if this is a shortcoming or an exceptional error, but from now on I'd rather delete the shortcut and create a new one.
What program do you use to zoom in on the pictures? Thank you for answer.
Napkin
Greetings,
Mr. Hrusko.
I've been looking for a long time to complain...
I've been using shortcuts since 2007 with the first BlackBerry. I'm really used to them and was very happy that Apple came up with sync between iOS and OSX.
But... Everything worked fine until the first iPhone update. Then there were problems. That "there was a shortcut and there is no more"
Now, after formatting the Air and 5s, I'm at the stage: Anything new I save in iOS works in both iOS and OSX. But what I save in OSX only works in OSX.
Signing out and back in to sync documents on iCloud doesn't help at all.
Do you happen to have any advice?
Hello, I have exactly the same problem, I learned to use shortcuts in my daily communication with customers, now I'm at the stage where they don't work for me either on my mac or on my iphone and ipad. On Mac they can only be added but they do not work and I have two old shortcuts that are not displayed and cannot be added at all on IOS. I called technical support 4 times, tried almost everything, including a complete reinstallation of all devices without restoring from iCloud. Is it possible to turn off the synchronization of shortcuts via iCloud with some command in the terminal? Please advise, I am quite unhappy about this.
iCloud Shortcut Sync is part of the sync called "Documents"
So if you turn off documents in iCloud settings, shortcuts won't sync either.
However, being without document sync is a terrible solution…