I just got a new iPod touch, and I love it so far, but I’m still getting used to a few things, including typing on the touchscreen. Any tips to speed up my acclimation a little?

We’ve been getting tons of these questions lately! We’ll answer a couple here since the holidays tend to add new iPhone and iPod touch owners to the ranks. You can find lots more tips and how-tos at maclife.com/articles/iphone and Apple posts tutorials at apple.com/iphone/how-to.

The Shift key's blue glow indicates that we are in Caps Lock mode.

Typing on a touchscreen can take a little getting used to--if you’re missing the letters a lot, try aiming your taps at the left edge of the letters. That really helped us. Auto-correction gets better over time, and you can train it by tapping the little X next to wrong guesses, or turn it off altogether in Settings > General > Keyboard. To save a little time, you can tap Space twice in a row to automatically add a period to the end of your sentence and capitalize your next letter. This is called the Period Shortcut, and if it doesn’t work, head to Settings > General > Keyboard to turn it on. In that same Settings screen, you can enable Caps Lock mode, letting you double-tap the Shift key to enter the mode (the Shift key turns blue), and tap Shift again to exit.