Summarize this for a high school graduate:
Text Replacement
TextReplacement
Declare a Personalized Vocabulary across Apple’s OSs with Text Replacement.
If you’re like me, your cumulative experience of typing on iPhones for more than a decade is probably saturated with needlessly disruptive, unsolicited, and inaccurate autocorrection. Certain proper nouns and a dozen or so quasi-localized dialectal terms in our day-to-day writing/speech have been treated by the system’s autocorrect as foreign objects, regardless of how frequently we use them. Technically, this isn’t supposed to happen, but – if you’ve got the patience and the time – there’s a native feature across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that allows you to declare your own user dictionary called Text Replacement.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4Pu4VCiApMU
You can find the Text Replacement menu on iOS – as pictured in the screenshot embedded above – by navigating to General ⇨ Keyboard ⇨ Text Replacement or (maybe) by tapping this link. If you think you might use it often, I’d suggest installing this Siri Shortcut I created that navigates directly to the Text Replacement menu. To be honest, I’ve no idea what you’ll find there if you’ve never created a single entry and – since there’s no way to import or export from the menu – I’m not willing to delete all of mine to find out.
TextReplacementEntry
Tap the plus (+) symbol in the upper right hand corner of this menu and you should find yourself on a screen identical to the one shown in the screenshot embedded above, with two text entry fields labeled Phrase and Shortcut. To simply define a phrase – like “Extratone,” for instance, we needn’t actually use the latter, though I almost always do. I would suggest making two entries for those terms that aren’t always lowercase/uppercase – Extratone and extratone.
My suggestion: you needn’t waste too much time sitting and noodling over potential entries. Instead, try to notice the next time you encounter a frustrating misapplication of autocorrect. Add the Siri Shortcut I shared above to your homescreen so that you can quickly access the menu in this situation. Adding a single word shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds, this way.
Here’s the result of my continuing this practice for the past few years:
https://gist.github.com/extratone/3c7788e41d32958a04a2ab693fe0512c
Text Expansion
The goal of this guide was to help those experiencing repeated incorrect autocorrect actions, but Text Replacement’s explicit purpose is also worth consideration. Similar in function to a favorite third-party app of mine called Text Expander, you can also use Text Replacement to create text shortcuts to lengthy/tedious/otherwise difficult to replicate text strings. This includes emojis! As you’ll note in the Gist embedded above, my typing out moyai with replace the text “moyai” with “🗿.” In order to escape the shortcut and simply print the word “moyai,” all I need to do is tap the esc key on my keyboard or the x in the upper right hand corner of the autocorrect object. See this demonstrated in my video guide and/or the GIF embedded below:
https://imgur.com/gallery/K3EWBqh
What I forgot to mention in the video is that the Text Replacement dictionary is persistent by default across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via iCloud. You’ll find the menu in the las…

Summarize this for a high school graduate:
Eighty days ago, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering ~~stood up in front of a crowd of~~…
No!… It was just me… Alone, in my mother’s basement, on a Monday morning, contorted at stupid angles, typing to my phone with a physical keyboard and unapologetically scarfing as much as I possibly could of the Apple community’s unbelievably unreserved, almost spiritual volume of pure hype from as many simultaneous sources as I could manage. (Hilariously, all of said sources are/were Discord servers, now, as in that “gamer” communications service I launched my little indie mag on in 2015 and kept comparing to Slack, but like an actual madman.)
Anyway, said Senior Vice President of Software Engineering (who we are encouraged to hold accountable for basically all technical changes to iOS) is named Craig, and these are his first few sentences:
For many of us, our iPhone has become indispensable. And at the heart of iPhone is iOS. iOS powers the experiences we’ve come to rely on. This year, we were inspired to create even more meaningful ways iPhone could help you. Our new release is iOS 15. It’s packed with features that make the iOS experience adapt to and complement the way you use iPhone…
I’m dwelling on them because they are patently meaningless. Very little to nothing coming in iOS 15 is what I would call ease-of-use-centric. Some of it – namely controversial (and now backpedaled) changes to the user interface of Safari – feels almost maliciously quartered in the opposite direction. Most of the changes in the subheadings of the full feature list are simply irrelevant in the use for all but the dorkiest iOS users, like myself, and I find the fact unacceptable, at the very least.
The Foundation Image
This is why I would like to try something different, this year, and focus on an entirely different audience: my family, as representatives of the vast majority of the iPhone’s billion-something demographic (read: customers.) That is to say, who Craig should be referring to with the phrase “most of us.” Not because I believe them to be “dumb” or “end users” (in the tech bro derogatory sense,) but because they are busy, working people who depend on their iPhone as a utilitarian device, above all else. They don’t have the time to dive deep into Apple documentation or watch the whole WWDC presentation to gain an understanding of where to look for new features or (unfortunately) how to turn them off. Realistically, they don’t even have time to read this whole Post, though I hope they will (sorry fam.)
Regardless of how we feel about it, Apple has made it clear that our phones are going to be further and further inundated with automated processes in the background. Whether you like it or not, your phone is going to be used to help find other users’ devices over the Find My network, your travel information is going to be used to inform Apple Maps’ live traffic statistics, and so on. For the more conservative members of my family, related truths about their phones are going to continue to feel like we are continuing to give up “ownership” of our devices. There are definitive alternatives, but they involve giving up a whole lot of conveniences. I will do my best to address this a bit later on, drawing from much more articulate criti…

Summarize this for a high school graduate:
Believe it or not, I, too originally sought the Russian-owned, cross-platform-as-hell messaging service for “privacy” – or perhaps solitude would be more apt. It was in 2017, amidst the shock that the Tump Presidency was actually going to happen 1, that I happened to hear about his pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whom had just 18 months prior led myself and some twenty thousand other poor souls in a most capitalist prayer to the Christian God for prosperity at her pyramid scheme’s ultimate “superbowl” gathering in Cincinatti. I had decided to “infiltrate” AMWAY under the ridiculous assumption that I might be able to contribute some new insight in writing critically about what I might witness. (In truth, I found my experiences that summer so utterly traumatic, existentially, that I never was able to do so.) I don’t know what consequences of her ascension to the Lord of American Schooling I expected to happen, but I was pretty hysterical about it – that is, more unhumorously alarmed about some grander world happening as I’d ever been by a long shot. For the first and only time in memory, I felt compelled to take some sort of malicious, obscured action – to organize somehow for a purpose other than to be publicly critical of this person, and to use my knowledge about digital media to the fullest possible extent to scrutinize her administration’s every movement and to be prepared, even, to take some sort of real action if she… well, I don’t know. I didn’t know anything, really, about anti-government organization, generally, but I was not acting rationally in the slightest.2
White Sapphire
I’m bringing this up for a few reasons, and the fact that the very first digital decision of my personal hysteria was to set up a private Telegram channel is telling, though I can’t recall just how much or how little I actually knew about it at the time. I launched myself back to the channel’s very beginning (easier to do with regular URLs than in any other service I’ve ever encountered,) but was only able to bring myself to dig just long enough to grab the utterly absurd photograph above… Though I certainly did not consider myself actively interested in automation at the time,3 Telegram’s infamous bot ecosystem proved so prevalent (and accessible,) that I was able to configure at least three bots on that channel within days of first establishing it: a repeater hooked to DeVos’ Twitter account, an RSS-powered bot watching the main feed of a website set up by Senator Elizabeth Warren called DeVos Watch, and another republishing everything from the Department of Education’s press releases feed.
Was any of it genuinely useful in helping me maintain Action Readiness in hypothetical defense of American education? Most certainly not. It was, however, genuinely comforting to have such diligent, automated minions keeping watch – to have a centralized, private, reliable, and purely-chronological feed of information in a super-handy location, regardless of whether or not it was usable. As I began to unconsciously integrate Telegram into my day-to-day online life on both of my PCs and my iPhone, the usefulness of my private channel for other applications became rapidly apparent. On iOS, not even dedicated file managers like DEVONthink are capable (or w…

Summarize this for a high school graduate:
Believe it or not, I, too originally sought the Russian-owned, cross-platform-as-hell messaging service for “privacy” – or perhaps solitude would be more apt. It was in 2017, amidst the shock that the Tump Presidency was actually going to happen 1, that I happened to hear about his pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whom had just 18 months prior led myself and some twenty thousand other poor souls in a most capitalist prayer to the Christian God for prosperity at her pyramid scheme’s ultimate “superbowl” gathering in Cincinatti. I had decided to “infiltrate” AMWAY under the ridiculous assumption that I might be able to contribute some new insight in writing critically about what I might witness. (In truth, I found my experiences that summer so utterly traumatic, existentially, that I never was able to do so.) I don’t know what consequences of her ascension to the Lord of American Schooling I expected to happen, but I was pretty hysterical about it – that is, more unhumorously alarmed about some grander world happening as I’d ever been by a long shot. For the first and only time in memory, I felt compelled to take some sort of malicious, obscured action – to organize somehow for a purpose other than to be publicly critical of this person, and to use my knowledge about digital media to the fullest possible extent to scrutinize her administration’s every movement and to be prepared, even, to take some sort of real action if she… well, I don’t know. I didn’t know anything, really, about anti-government organization, generally, but I was not acting rationally in the slightest.2
White Sapphire
I’m bringing this up for a few reasons, and the fact that the very first digital decision of my personal hysteria was to set up a private Telegram channel is telling, though I can’t recall just how much or how little I actually knew about it at the time. I launched myself back to the channel’s very beginning (easier to do with regular URLs than in any other service I’ve ever encountered,) but was only able to bring myself to dig just long enough to grab the utterly absurd photograph above… Though I certainly did not consider myself actively interested in automation at the time,3 Telegram’s infamous bot ecosystem proved so prevalent (and accessible,) that I was able to configure at least three bots on that channel within days of first establishing it: a repeater hooked to DeVos’ Twitter account, an RSS-powered bot watching the main feed of a website set up by Senator Elizabeth Warren called DeVos Watch, and another republishing everything from the Department of Education’s press releases feed.
Was any of it genuinely useful in helping me maintain Action Readiness in hypothetical defense of American education? Most certainly not. It was, however, genuinely comforting to have such diligent, automated minions keeping watch – to have a centralized, private, reliable, and purely-chronological feed of information in a super-handy location, regardless of whether or not it was usable. As I began to unconsciously integrate Telegram into my day-to-day online life on both of my PCs and my iPhone, the usefulness of my private channel for other applications became rapidly apparent. On iOS, not even dedicated file managers like DEVONthink are capable (or w…