Sometimes, you use words in other languages so often that as convenient as it already is, it's still a hassle to switch keyboards.

But you can use the keyboard shortcut for such words. It's faster and doesn't break your flow. Like so.

Also useful for special characters.

[crarko adds: I know we've had hints about using this for special characters before, but this seems to illustrate the idea of what this feature was designed for perfectly.]

Here's a piece of new functionality with iOS 5 Weather app.

The Weather app doesnt look like it has changed much, but when looking at the forecast for the week, tap and pull down below a day and it will give an hourly forecast.

[crarko adds: Hey, that's pretty cool. I hadn't noticed this before.]

iOS 5 introduced Private Browsing, which can be set via Settings » Safari.

To tell whether you have Private Browsing turned on when using Safari on an iOS device, the chrome around the browser window will be black. When Private Browsing is turned off, it's the standard bluish-gray.

[crarko adds: A useful find, and I admit I hadn't noticed the addition. I always used a third party browser if I wanted this feature.]

The old tap and drag to mass select photos has been reassigned to rearranging photos. So it isn't obvious how to select large groups of photos anymore. Many people have commented on the Apple Discussion Forums having trouble with this.

The new method is simple but not so intuitive. Just use two fingers, close together to tap on a photo, hold for a second and then drag across all the photos you want to select.

It works just like the old method, just needs two fingers instead of one.

[crarko adds: I tried this with the iPhone but I think you'd need far smaller fingers than mine to do this.]

After a quick Google search (as well as on macosxhints.com), I'm sharing this feature I discovered by accident. If your iOS 5 device is locked and you receive a notification, you can swipe the notification instead of the 'Slide to Unlock' widget, and you will be automatically directed to the related app. If you have a passcode, you'll still be prompted to enter it.

I've tested this on the following devices:

• iPhone 4 with iOS 5.0.1
• iPhone 3GS with iOS 5.0
• iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 in both portrait and landscape mode

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]

Sometimes when I browse through the web on my iPad, I need to know todays date.

Unfortunately, iOS 5 has no way to show the date without quitting the current app to have a look at the Calendars icon. As there is no jailbreak yet for iOS 5 on iPad2 I was looking how this could be achieved using the Notification Center in iOS 5.

You need to create a new iCloud calendar which has an all-day event for everyday which tells the current date. Of course, this is a tedious task if you need to create an event for everyday.

So I made an AppleScript where you can select a range of dates for which those events will be created.

By default it creates the Events in an calendar called 'Todayis.' Please create this Calendar on iCloud before running the app, or your new calendar will end up on your Mac. The name of the calendar can be changed if you want to add the events to your default calendar. You will be prompted for a calendar name when running the script. ...

I stumbled upon this while dictating a text message to my daughter. You can use Siri on iPhone 4s to dictate emoticons in your text! I even tested this in the Notes app, so very likely this will work anywhere text can be dictated. Here are the basic ones I was able to use.

• :-) = 'Smiley face.'
• ;-) = 'Winky face.'
• :-( = 'Sad Face.'

Can anyone determine any others? I wasn't able to get 'Tongue Face' to work.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Hopefully Siri will never learn LOL-speech.]

Not sure if anyone else has seen this problem, but the atomic symbol for generating Genius lists disappeared from song titles on my iPhone 4 (in the Music app) after upgrading to iTunes Match.

Another weird behavior is that Genius lists I create on my MacBook Pro using iTunes do transfer to my iPhone via iTunes Match, but can't be refreshed on the iPhone.

[crarko adds: I don't use iTunes Match, so I can't test this. Please confirm (or deny) this odd behavior in the comments section. I haven't noticed a lot of other reports on this, so it's quite possible it's a unique situation with the hint's author. If so, anyone with an idea of what would cause this please chime in as well.]