I would have written this post on my iPhone using the Word Press app – but then I remembered that I can’t COPY AND PASTE the url!

So go here: iPhone-Cut-and-Paste and sign the petition.

Q. I recently got a new iPhone and I find that entering text can be tricky. Can you suggest any things that will make typing easier.

A. If you recently switched from another handheld device such as a Blackberry or a Palm you’ll find that entering text on iPhone is different because of the tactile differences of using a touchscreen. When entering text on your iPhone you are presented with QWERTY style keyboard. Numbers and punctuation are accessed by clicking the key in the lower left-hand corner.

One of the first and tricks I learned while entering text on my phone was that to quickly access punctuation while entering letters you can press and hold the punctuation key, slide your finger over to the character you want and release your finger. Then you’ll find that the iPhone switches back to the QWERTY keyboard. This makes entering text with punctuation relatively easy because you can quickly access commonly used characters such as a comma, period, underscores and dashes.

While you’re walking down the street you tend to bounce around quite a bit. With a device like a Blackberry, or a cell phone you have actual keys so it’s easier to find the character you want. So using the “sliding finger trick” on your iPhone you can accomplish the same thing. When you press a key on the keyboard and display shows you the keys selected by popping up. If you hold your finger over the key you can see if you have the right key or not. If you don’t, you can slide to left or right and choose the correct key. [If I'm close, I often roll my finger left and right to choose a character while holding my finger down.] Of course you should always be aware of what you are doing and ideally you should stop walking while you’re entering text – so that you don’t have an accident while you’re not paying attention to where you’re going.

By the way, you can also access accented keys by holding down your finger over a letter that would have special punctuation. For instance if you hold down the keep the letter “E” you can access accents “grave”, “acute”, “circumflex”, “tréma” or “umlaut” and “cedilla”.

If make a mistake while entering text, you can hold your finger down on the text that you entered and a magnified view will appear and you can slide your finger until the cursor goes where you want within a word. To fine tune this you can roll your finger to more accurately place the cursor.

There is also a free application in the App Store called “WritingPad” which takes the sliding finger to the next level. To spell out words you slide your finger over the letters that spell the word all without lifting your finger – sliding rather than tapping.

Speaking of not lifting a figure – this article was input into Word using MacSpeech Dictate – spoken into an iMac not typed on the keyboard.

[There are also now many stylus products that work with the iPhone - hand if you're wearing gloves.]

Q. Does Windows File Sharing run automatically on Leopard, or is there something else I need to do?

A. Windows file sharing is still available in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard although it appears to be hidden. To turn on Windows file sharing, open “System Preferences” and click on the sharing icon. Next put a checkmark next to “File Sharing” and with it highlighted you should see the current shared Folders and Users who are able to connect to your Mac. When a user from a remote Mac or Windows machine wants to access a file they would connect by either by choosing “Connect to Server” in the Finder on the Mac or by choosing your Mac from “My Network Places”.

In previous versions of OS X, Windows file sharing was sharing preference on its own. In Leopard, File Sharing is customized the “Options…” button. From there you can control whether users can connect to by Apple Filesharing Protocol, Windows File Sharing, also known as SMB and Samba, as well as FTP. By default only AFP is active. When you choose “Share files and folders with SMB”, you will also need to choose the user account that is able to access the files on your Mac and you will also need to authenticate the access by entering your username and password.

It appears that the people at E-ChannelNews.com do not want you to contact them. You cannot unsubscribe from their unwanted email (the provided mechanism doesn’t work.) There is no phone number to contact them with and any attempt to email them bounces back.

It is this author’s expert opinion that they are spammers – and I am going to report them. If you are having trouble getting off their mailing list I suggest you do the same.

I’m tired of companies whining about people downloading media or watching shows on Youtube. If you are in Canada and you go to an American TV shows website to watch published content – you are told the the “content is currently unavailable” in your area. Forget about the inability of the Chinese to access content – someone or some agency (the CRTC?) is blocking our access to content.

Beware that the ISPs in Canada have the ability to control what web content you have access to – net neutrality should be a real concern. Rogers and Sympatico could easily lock out access to certain websites and in fact could begin to package websites like Cable TV channels and therefore further limiting our access. It may be time to contact your local MP to make sure this doesn’t happen. Bell and Telus charging users for incoming text messages is only the beginning.