Typing in Croatian on the iPhone
Now that 3.0 has a Croatian dictionary for auto-correction, I actually find it easier to type Croatian on the iPhone than on my Mac. Emailing my family from the Mac is pretty painful; I hate switching keyboard layouts (I can never remember the shortcut), and how the heck do I keep track of what key which non-English character maps to?
I find the same thing true about typing in Polish, at least as far as the auto-correction goes: ‘czesc’ becomes ‘cześć’, ‘dziekuje’ becomes ‘dziękuję’, etc. On the Mac though, I mostly just use the ‘US Extended’ (formerly ‘Unicode’) keyboard layout, because it gives me the ability to type in pretty much any roman-based language I choose. I can apply acute accents to just about any letter using Option-e (to produce ń, ź, ś, ć), I can put a dot over a z with Option-w (ż), I can add a tail with Option-m (ę, ą), and get a barred letter using option-ell (ł). These work for lots of different letters too.
For Croatian in particular, here’s how to get those different letters and accents:
- ć — option-e [letter]
- č ž š — option-v [letter]
- Đ đ — option-ell [letter]
Using this approach means you don’t have to memorize a different keyboard layout (Polish keyboards have accented letters over where [, ], and \ are on ours, for example). And of course it means you won’t have to switch keyboard layouts at all unless you want to type in a completely different alphabet such as Greek or Cyrillic. Even Japanese can be typed on an English keyboard— typing ‘akira’ with a Katakana input method results in ‘アキラ’ for example.
Neat huh?
