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Adam Christianson's great tip on how to type an Apple symbol in iOS

typing the apple symbol on an iOS keyboard

TUAW bloggers love writing up things that we know make life easier for our readers. Every once in a while, we see a tip on another site that makes us say "Why didn't I think of that?" That's the case with this wonderful tip posted yesterday by Adam Christianson (@maccast) over on The Mac Observer. For those of us who need the ability to type the Apple symbol --  -- on an iOS device, this tip is pure gold.

I'm not going through all of the steps in the details that Adam did; you'll need to pop over to MacObserver.com to do that. But when you want to send your buddies some  love or do some iPhone blogging about the  watch, here's the condensed version of his tip:

  1. From a device with a real keyboard, send yourself an email or message with the Apple symbol in it. That's Option-Shift-K. If you're reading this post on your iOS device, just copy the .

  2. Open that email or message on the device you want to add  to, then copy the symbol.

  3. On the device, open Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Tap the + to add a new shortcut, paste the  into the "Phrase" field, then type a shortcut into the "shortcut" field. Adam used a comma followed by the letters apl as his shortcut, and I found it worked really well since it's not something you'll ordinarily type.

  4. Now, whenever you type the shortcut, the  will appear in its place.

What was interesting is that the shortcut quickly appeared on my Macs, apparently through iCloud syncing. However, that syncing did not happen between my various iOS devices, so I had to physically add the shortcut to each device. All of those iOS devices are running iOS 8 betas, so it might be a bug.

I'm looking forward to using Adam's shortcut on that new iPhone 6 Plus that should be showing up next Friday...