Characters

The keyboard offers a number of common characters for the language layout you have chosen, especially when you use modifier keys such as Shift, Command, and Option to invoke alternative character sets; however, while those that are mapped to various keys are common, they are only a minor subset of the characters that are available for you to use when composing documents.

OS X's support for unicode fonts makes a vast array of characters available for you to use in applications that are coded with Apple's Cocoa frameworks, and while some programs have their own input methods for … Read more

If you are on Twitter, you most likely read about the death of Steve Jobs in the numerous tweets that seemed to take over the service for hours. You may have also noticed, or have even taken part in, sending a tweet with nothing more than an Apple logo icon, as a miniature tribute to the greatest visionary of our time.

Read on to find out how to get the Apple logo icon on your iOS device, as well as some other special characters that iOS and Emoji don't provide. … Read more

Backstab is a loosely pirate-themed third-person action-adventure game with promising potential but frustratingly flawed execution given its price.

Backstab advertises an "unprecedented story" and a "blockbuster production with the best graphics." Unfortunately, the story is highly precedented (and told unevenly, with spotty voice acting and wooden animations) and the graphics--while somewhat impressive for a mobile device, especially given the game's limited sandbox environment--are far from the best. Backstab evokes derivative late '90s console games, although with more-frustrating controls: what should be an intuitive camera system (you swipe the screen to rotate the camera) is anything … Read more

Apple is steadily adding new options to keyboard entry behaviors in OS X to provide quick access to options and to help prevent common typing mistakes. For instance, in Snow Leopard Apple introduced systemwide autocorrect to fix typos and misspelled words. With OS X Lion, Apple has brought in some additional features and behaviors, including changes to character repeats and quicker access to special characters.

Character repeats In previous versions of OS X, when you pressed and held a key the system would continually enter the characters corresponding to that key until you released the key. The rate of repetition … Read more

Let's cut to the chase. U.S. Cellular's Samsung Character is an affordable slide-out QWERTY messaging phone with the kind of traits that place it in the teenage camp. Running Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz Lite interface, its home screens are ruled by widgets, and its apps by texting and music. There is one extra feature I like, but I'd like it more if it showed up as a widget. Watch the video above and read my full review for more on the Samsung Character.

If you're of the school of cell phone design that leans toward messaging cell phones with full QWERTY keyboards, U.S. Cellular's newest phone is meant for you.

The Samsung Character, released today, features a 2.8-inch QVGA touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and of course, Bluetooth support. There's also an onboard music player.

The Character runs on Samsung's custom TouchWiz Lite interface, with three home screens. It costs $39.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate, and is available in blue and gray.

Every now and then you may need to enter special characters and symbols when writing, which can be for relatively common tasks such as character accents or "degree" signs, but also for more obscure or specialized symbols. In the past, many of these came from using special fonts (Wingdings or Dingbats) that contained these symbols as alternates to the standard alphanumeric characters, but these days fonts make use of the Unicode system and can include hundreds or thousands of available symbols.

As with other PC systems, the Mac keyboard layout is a standard one for the most commonly … Read more

Most consumer level Canon printers use optical character recognition (OCR) to translate scanned images of printer or handwritten documents to editable electronic text, but the latest version of Uniflow, the company's corporate document management system, uses OCR to prevent people from printing or copying documents that contain specific words.

Uniflow is a central management system that allows administrators to keep track of copies and prints for billing and requires an accompanying Uniflow server and Uniflow-ready Canon devices. The latest version, Uniflow 5, can also block documents containing prohibited keywords--sensitive information like passwords and account numbers.

Admins can also configure … Read more

If you've ever had to insert multiple Unicode characters while typing, you know what a pain it is to have to go back and forth inserting characters into your text. Character Map (Java) is a simple--but helpful--program that lets you select the Unicode characters you want to insert and copy them to your clipboard for quick pasting.

We have to admit, we were a bit stumped by the program at first glance. Character Map (Java) runs as an executable file, so no installation is needed; however, it comes in a ZIP file filled with more than 20 different files. … Read more