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| © Provided by BGR |
By Jacob Siegal, BGR
iPhone owners are appreciative of the fact that iOS allows them to
tap or drag the cursor in order to change or delete a specific word in a
text message, but it can be a surprisingly difficult task to perform.
No matter how small your hands are, trying to tap the invisible gap
between two letters can be maddening, and it often takes several tries
to get it right. More often than not, I just hold down the backspace key
until I reach the problem area.
But it turns out that it doesn’t have to be this way. While you can
try to manually adjust the cursor with your fat fingers, Apple has also
included an alternate control scheme that most people don’t know about.
On Sunday, food blogger Krissy Brierre-Davis shared a tip on Twitter
which immediately went viral. It turns out that if you click and hold
on the space bar when the keyboard appears, the keyboard turns into a
touchpad which you can use to drag the cursor freely around the text
box. This trick works for phones without 3D touch like the iPhone XR. On
handsets with 3D Touch, you can press firmly and hold anywhere on the
keyboard for a second or two to activate the touchpad, eliminating the
need for tapping on words.
It’s
worth noting that this is not a new feature. In fact, the feature first
made its way to Apple’s smartphones with the iPhone 6s in 2015. You can
find articles online explaining how to use the feature
from over three years ago. And yet, based on the reaction
to Brierre-Davis’s tweet, tons of iPhone owners had no idea this was
possible. Brierre-Davis says she saw the image first on Facebook, but
couldn’t identify the original source.
If you’ve been using this
feature for years and can’t believe everyone else is just now figuring
this out: Good for you. The rest of us will continue to be dumbstruck by
the fact that we missed this the first time around.
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