Texting faster

I am way late to this party, but I have to tell you about a cool feature I didn’t know my phone had. I only discovered it a few weeks ago, and it has already saved me hours at this point.

I write many drafts for my newsletter and blog on my way to work. My iPhone has a decently sized keyboard, but typing on it still isn’t great. On a good day, I used to get a few bullet points out before I arrived at my destination. I would then only be able to turn those into full sentences once I was on a "real keyboard". It was better than nothing, but never felt quite productive enough.

Under the name "QuickPath", iOS 13 now has a built-in swipe keyboard. Without lifting your finger, you swipe to where you would have to tap and it recognizes the word you meant to type. It gets me the words I want in a fraction of the time it would take to type them traditionally, with very few misses. I was skeptical at first, but it has won me over.

Instead of a few rough bullet points, I now get several full paragraphs out by the time I need to change trains. I use this feature for writing notes, texting my wife, and writing into my Day One-journal. Over all applications, this single feature has already saved me a lot of time in a few weeks.

Apple is good at hiding features behind invisible gestures, so I thought I’d remind you of this one. Do you know of any other cool features our devices have that many don’t know about? I’d appreciate the tip!

– Dom