Why did you change text replacement Apple?

I'd gotten used to using the very handy "Text replacement" function on my iPhone.

You use it by entering the text that you want to appear when you type in a shortcut anywhere in you phone.

For example, I use the shortcut "hh" to type in the words "Heading home now from ".

I use this phrase a lot to let my wife know I am heading home (obviously) and I add a custom location at the end.

I have a quite a few such shortcuts; mc - missed call message, abitlate - a message to customers when I have been unavoidably delayed etc.

But ever since iOS 12 arrived this feature has been predominantly broken.

I thought it was me. I rebooted my phone several times when it seemed to work for one thing but not another and most recently, having got Jack of the issue, Googled it to see when a fix was due.

It seems there is no fix. Apple did this on purpose!

Apple, apparently, have limited the number of characters that the text replacement can do to 128.

So that's why some of mine worked and some didn't. The long ones just borked...did nothing. No error message, no warning, no nothing. How rude.

A bunch of people pleaded to Apple to fix it another just said "I installed Gboard instead and all my shortcuts work again."

That worked for me too. All my shortcuts work again even better than they used to. There's a sexy little preview of what is happening so it just doesn't "happen" the way it used to.

It even works way better than the built in iphone/iOS keyboards at pretty much everything else too.

Gboard is an extra keyboard made by Google to be used on your iPhone. You can read more about it here.

It does lots of extra neat stuff but the best part is that, so far, it seems to work a lot better than the default iOS keyboard when doing even just the basics.

IOS's handling of letters to numeric handling annoyed me. When I wanted a space in a phone number it just bailed out back to letter entry and I had to reselect number entry. So annoying!

But don't take my word for it.

You note the link to more inform ation above takes you to "Cult of Mac", so even the polo neck brigade like it.

Reviews on iTunes (the App store) even proclaim it better than the standard keyboard.

So go here https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1091700242?mt=8 and check it out if you fancy.

David

#apple #ios #keyboard