I've had a BlackBerry Bold 9000 for about 5 month and my obsession with keyboard shortcuts applies here too.
This is the third post in a series about using technology to be more efficient. Here's the full series.
Trackball vs wheel
The wheel on the side of older blackberries was brilliant for one reason: it clicked. That's great tactile feedback and it makes it really easy to scroll accurately. If you need to move down 2 lines you just scroll until it clicks twice. It's all to do with motor memory like I talked about in a previous post. The upshot is that I'm not a big fan of the trackball on my bold. I keep overshooting and it's very frustrating to use. So the more I can do using the keyboard the better.
The standard keyboard shortcuts on the blackberry have been covered at length by better blogs than mine so I'll just link to a good one.
That said, here are the ones not to miss for any new BB users out there:
Hit spacebar twice to get full stop
Press and hold a letter to capitalise
Hold down shift and scroll to select text
Alt+trackballClick to copy
Shift+trackballClick to paste
Auto text
Get into auto text, it's great. It makes you a better typer with out the effort. A good example is that auto text takes care of apostrophes. If you need to type "they've" for example your fingers need to spring over to the alt key to get the inverted comma. Using alt just slows you down so don't bother - Auto Text will take care of it for you. It's on-the-fly so you don't need to do anything, just keep typing. Miss out the apostrophe and your Blackberry will put it in for you. Here are some example:
Type "heres" to get "here's"
hes to get he's
havent to get haven't
You get the idea. It won't change Ill to I'll because Ill is a word! In thoses cases usualy knocking off the last letter will trigger Auto Text, eg:
Il becomes I'll
Wel becomes We'll
So give that a try. One notable exception is "it's". There's no Auto Text way to type "it's" because "its" is a word and there's no shorter option that isn't also a word. But I hardly ever have to type "its" so I've added my own Auto Text to do just that. On the rare occasions I need "its" I just hit backspace to undo the Auto Text.
Get into adding your own auto text entries to speed up things you commonly write like your signature. For example you could set Auto Text to replace "sigsm" with:
Steve Mould
www.stevemould.com
Brilliant time saver.
Here's how to use AutoText to make typing smileys quicker.
Shortcuts from the home screen
TURN OFF "DIAL FROM HOME SCREEN"!
Once you turn off Dial From Home Screen in the settings loads of application will be just one button press away. To turn off "dial from home screen" click the green phone button. Click menu. Click options. Click general option. Set dial from home screen to "no".
Here's a full list of apps that launch from keyboard shortcuts from the home screen:
- (A)ddress Book
- (*) depressed for two seconds locks the Bold
- (B)rowser
- (C)ompose Message
- Memo Pa(D)
- (E)nterprise Messenger v2
- Pro(F)iles
- (G)oogle Talk (only 3rd party app I know of that has this!)
- (H)elp
- (I)deaMatrix (3rd party app by RexWireless)
- Or... AOL (I)nstant Messenger
- Loc(K)
- Ca(L)endar
- (M)essages
- BlackBerry Messe(N)ger
- (O)ptions
- (P)hone or Peek-a-boo [1]
- Enterprise Messenger (Q), or
- (#) When depressed for two seconds, switches between your Normal and Vibrate profile
- (Q)uicknote, if installed QuickNote or QSMS [2]
- (S)earch
- (T)asks
- Calc(U)lator
- Sa(V)ed messages
- (W)AP Browser
- Windows Live Messenger (X), or ToDoMatri(X) (3rd party app by RexWireless)
- (Y)ahoo messenger
- Biz(Z)Mathica (if installled)
Unfortunately, the list isn't customisable. So how do you launch all your other favourite apps without using the trackball? Well, for everything else there's ShortcutMe. The most useful app I've got on my Blackberry!
ShortcutMe
ShortcutMe launches applications using the keyboard and you launch ShortcutMe using one of the convenience keys. In your face, trackball!
And it's not just for applications. You can streamline other tasks too. If there's a contact you email of text a lot you can assign a short cut to the email and SMS compose screens with their details already entered. Want to go straight to a particular website? It can do that too. I've got an image of the London Underground map on my phone and a shortcut assigned to that. Very useful.
It's a couple of pounds but definitely worth it.
A couple more thoughts on keyboard shortcuts before I go.
QSMS is an app that makes the Q key into a shortcut to compose a text message. Strangely missing from the BB.
And don't forget, you don't need to use the trackball to scroll through menus. Just type the letter of the menu item you want (it doesn't need to be underlined to work). If there's more than one menu item starting with the same letter just press repeatedly until you get the one you want. You can then click the trackball or even better, hit enter.
Tags: blackberry, how I use, keyboard shortcuts, Technology
