Commonplace Pages

Q. During meetings, you like to take notes on your tablet, smartphone or laptop. Is that acceptable?

A. “As soon as you take the device out, tell the other attendees, ‘I use my iPad or phone to take notes.’ That way, no one will question if you’re paying attention,” he says.

We were talking about this just the other day. Will giving folks a heads up enough? And also, does typing notes on an iPad seemingly less annoying than an iPhone?

Once books stop being only finished, whole things — when they can also be works in progress, works in development — the possibilities for journalists open up. Imagine a book on the health-care reform debate that could be updated with each twist and turn, adding profiles of the players, daily news updates, legislative summaries, and more as the story developed.

Not a bad idea.

You can create unlimited types of icons on both your Home screen and your Home screen folders. 

Finally! Though this type of functionality should be a part of the iOS. In fact, programmable gestures would actually be nice.

Still very convenient.

I’ve had my iPhone 4s for a few days and I can finally agree with those that talk about the smartphone as being a computer. This iPhone 4s is slick. The speed and the HDR is an enormous improvement from my old 3gs.

And these sets of iOS 5 tips and tricks is a huge help:

A new split keyboard (only for iPad) lets you tap out a message using your thumbs. When you’re holding the iPad in landscape view, sometimes the keyboard is hard to type if you have smaller hands. To get the split keyboard, simply place two fingers on the keyboard and move them outwards to split the keyboard in half.

Brilliant.

For those of you that love and adore TextExpander, you’ll appreciate this one. It’s not a replacement for TextExpander Touch by any means but is a time saver. Buried inside the Settings.app go to Keyboard > Shortcuts to see what’s there or ‘Add New Shortcut…’ Type a phrase and your shortcut keys. Works great for email, popular URLs, names, etc.

This is extremely helpful considering how many times I enter my email for iCloud and other services.

If you use Apple’s headphone with the remote it is possible to take picture using Volume-Up button. This sounds silly but think of it as a long distance shutter button.

My fingers are often in the shot. This will come in handy.

Several other great tips in this list. Did I mention how great the photos look?