A couple of folks asked how to enter the degree symbol and other Unicode characters on iOS. The degree symbol is easy enough: press and hold the 0 key until a popover appears, then slide to select the symbol. (Yes, it’s awfully confusing that on iOS, 0 gets you the degree symbol, but on macOS it gets you the similar but definitely different masculine ordinal indicator.)

This method exposes many accented letters and useful symbols (like currency: press and hold $ to get £, €, ¥, and others), but it doesn’t provide options for entering trademark or copyright symbols, for example, nor a full Unicode character set.

For about a nanosecond, I considered vibe-coding a Unicode keyboard, but fortunately my better sense prevailed and instead, I searched for an existing solution, which I found in Jordan Hipwell’s UniChar. You can browse and search for Unicode characters, or enable the iOS keyboard to type them directly. It’s free to download (with hundreds of characters available for free, including the degree (°, ℃, ℉), trademark (™), and copyright (©) symbols), plus dozens of Unicode categories available for a $10 one-time purchase.

(Hipwell is a longtime Apple platform developer and the creator of the also-useful DateStamper. He’s a damn fine photographer, too.)

Okay… hopefully that’s the last of my now inaccurately named degree symbol trilogy.