typing foreign languages

I've started the Vietnamese language tree on Duolingo, just for fun. Vietnamese uses a Latin alphabet with digraphs and diacritics to represent the many possible spoken tones of Vietnamese (before the French invaded, they used Chinese logograms).

So how does one type a tonal language? Those little marks are important, and they mean the difference between a word like mother (mẹ) and horse (mé). You can "hunt and peck" for them as shown above, but it's a slow process. It turns out iOS (and macOS) provide another input method, and I stumbled upon it by chance. When certain characters are typed consecutively, such as 'dd', it will replace those characters with a another set of marked letters, like đ. It turns out this input system has a name, Telex, and it's something of a standard. There's even a neat website where you can try it out for yourself.

bonus content: replacing stupid apps with shortcuts.app

Apple launched Shortcuts for iOS in 2019, but I've only just come around to using them. The Shortcuts app is really a way to write small programs or macros, and it has some neat functionality. However, to work with a certain app it must be provided an integration by the app's developer. In this sense it is rather limited, because there is no support for playing back screen inputs or navigating through apps in a generic way. It can only complete functions that the developer has specifically included to work with Shortcuts. Apple also only provides a limited set of operations that can be done outside of applications. A few of these strike me as rather odd; you can open an app with Shortcuts, but you can't close it. You can generate a hash value or scrape internet connection details, but you can't change the homescreen wallpaper.

Regardless, I've found a few good ways to utilize them. Mostly these are related to working with Apple's Health app. The Health app provides some good insights if you feed it lots of data like water intake or miles walked, and it can be a good kick in the rump to get you exercising or taking better care of yourself. Writing data to Health manually is not a great experience though; it's menu-intensive and rather slow to add data points. This problem has created a niche of tiny apps that essentially just increment a value inside the Health app. The lighter-weight solution Apple has provided here is to use Shortcuts instead. Here's what it looks like when a few Shortcuts are set up in a homescreen widget:

Shortcuts' ability to set a default value make it especially useful. For a shortcut that logs water intake, I might set it to '1500' to represent the size of my water bottle in millimeters, or '3' for tea timer's countdown in minutes. Most importantly, it can also write to the Health app, allowing me to get delete two entire apps that did the same thing. You can check out an example of mine here. ※