I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We did, but I know that I’ll be avoiding any scales I come across for a while. Though it’s Cyber Monday, let’s continue the spirit of Thanksgiving with a little trick that I’m sure thankful for. If you use an iPhone and have ever been frustrated trying to manipulate the cursor while typing an e-mail or text, then today’s post is for you.
Autocorrect. It’s amazing how one word can bring about so many powerful emotions. Even the calmest among us has been driven insane by this “feature”. It’s almost comical how thoughts can be turned into words and phrases that can change the spirit of the text completely. As a result, proofreading is paramount. “Read twice and send once” needs to be the mantra. The problem with this is, sometimes you need to place the cursor in a specific place to fix the mess that autocorrect has caused. Doing this is definitely easier said than done. Maybe it’s possible if you have the fingers of a six year old girl. I don’t, unfortunately, which is what made the magnifying glass revelation such a game changer for me.
So, apparently, this trick first came to be in 2015. I’m late to the party, which is really nothing new. Grab your iPhone and create a new text or e-mail. Don’t send it to anyone because it doesn’t even have to make sense. After typing a few words, hold your finger anywhere in the “iMessage” field (where the words appear as you’re typing, just above the keyboard), and slide your finger to the left and right. You’ll notice that a magnifying glass will enlarge the text, and the cursor will move from one letter to the next. Have you ever tried to type “Brian” and got “Brain” instead? Now you can place the cursor with precision just before the “n” and fix two letters rather than erase the entire word and have to start over. This simple action makes life so much easier when editing individual letters or words. I hate to admit that I’ve deleted entire sentences before knowing this!
Have you ever seen one of those posts on social media asking how old you were when you discovered a nuance of some kind? Often the answer is, “I was today years old.” I was today years old with this whole magnifying thing. All that matters is I know it now, and won’t have to curse the iPhone’s cursor again!