How to reveal iOS 5 iMessages timestamps!

Sometimes I come back to iMessages on my iPod after having received multiple messages from the same sender, and want to know the time that a particular message was sent.

Timestamps of messages can be found with a swipe in iOS 7. In iOS 5 (and, I suspect, iOS 6), there is also a way to find the timestamp of any message in an iMessages conversation. In some cases you must delete surrounding messages, but you could copy their content elsewhere first (long-press or double-tap a message, and Copy), if you needed it (I myself rarely need such).

(1) If the message for which you want the timestamp is from "today" (after the most recent midnight), then:

(1a) If it is the last message in the conversation, you can go ("back") to the Messages list to see its timestamp.

(1b) If it is not the last message in your conversation, then:

(1bi) If it contains a string which isn't found among the conversation's other currently loaded messages (or if found chronologically first in your target message), go to the Messages list, search for that string, and you will see the intraday (hours:minutes and AM/PM) timestamp there. As needed, you can "Load Earlier Messages" at the top of a conversation; those are cleared by quitting and loading the iMessages app again.

(1bii) Delete other, later messages from the bottom up, until it newly becomes the last message in the conversation, then see (1a) above.

All of the above ideas except for (1bii) were mentioned on http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/32408/can-messages-display-the-timestamp-of-every-incoming-message, which was the best solution I had found before doing the investigation which led to this blog entry.

The next method is not limited to messages from "today".  Every message has timestamp data, but iMessages only shows that to you under certain conditions.

When you start exchanging messages, that delineates the beginning of what I call a "snippet", which is a piece of your conversation (someone else referred to this as a "chunk"). iMessages identifies that with a center-justified snippet header which shows both the date and time. After some period of inactivity (15 minutes? That's someone else's guess; I didn't research it.), iMessages will end that snippet. Subsequent messages between you and the other party will generate a new snippet with its own snippet header.

By deleting earlier messages in a snippet, you can update the snippet header to show the timestamp of the first remaining message in the snippet. Not exactly obvious, but that's how you can find the timestamp of any message, no matter how old.

iOS keyboard shortcuts: leveraging repeated letters

iOS keyboard shortcuts, such as iOS 5's default example of "omw", which can expand to "On my way!", provide an option to save typing. They are however, only useful if you can get used to using them often enough to make the step of creating them worthwhile.

I do a fair amount of typing on my iPod (drafting blog entries like this one, among other things), and am generally interested in making that faster and more efficient. I frequently am only able to use a single thumb or a single finger on my iPod to type, which increases the value of keyboard shortcuts to me.

For some "extreme" keyboard shortcuts, I took a cue from Apple's time-saving option of converting two spaces into a period and a space (Settings > General > Keyboard > "." shortcut*). You can be more efficient any time you can tap a key twice and get the option of an alternate result which is more useful than the double characters actually typed. For instance, when I type "ff", a keyboard shortcut of mine, I can choose to get "from", which I use far more frequently than I need "ff" at the beginning of a word. The space bar being the largest key, it's typically easiest to tap, and is a fine activator of keyboard shortcut expansions, provided that you want to insert a space after the expansion (and usually continue writing more text). It is typically not necessary to use the space bar to get the expansion; you can usually tap near the offered expansion to get it. I've also observed that, in certain situations, expansions of keyboard shortcuts are not offered, sometimes clearly correctly, but other times less so.

I use many of the double letter possibilities for keyboard shortcuts. I skipped doubles that had a pre-existing use which was important to me and therefore should not be replaced, e.g.:

• "mm" for millimeters
• "cc" for carbon copy / cubic centimeters
• "ee" which prompts to see if you really meant to type "we"

For one particular sentence I use very often, I'm even using both "fff" and "ffff" as keyboard shortcuts. I try to tap f three times only, but If I inadvertently tap an extra f, the quadruple f accommodates my true intentions.

Since many words/phrases in Chinese (and their associated Pinyin spellings) or in French come easily to my mind, I sometimes leveraged personalized "codes" for them. Having multiple languages from which to draw such codes makes it easier to come up with a practical variety of doubled letter keyboard shortcuts for things, given that there are but 26 letters in the alphabet. Farther below are some of my shortcuts, which may provide ideas for anyone seeking to do something similar. I would change the expansion for any of them if I found a more useful one.

I'm usually typing general prose. If you regularly type specialized or technical prose (e.g., part numbers!), keyboard shortcuts similar to what I describe here may not work well for you. Owing to how often they are needed, prepositions are frequently useful keyboard shortcut expansion candidates. Some paired characters such as "()" are also useful to me.

A sample of my keyboard shortcuts which are, or are based on, letter tuples (repeated letters):

• aa: after. I accept a little inconvenience when typing AA for batteries or American Airlines.
• bb: before.
• ff: from.
• gg: change. From the Chinese 改變 gǎibiàn. As mentioned above, I didn't want to make "cc" a keyboard shortcut even though "change" starts with the letter c. For verbs, I often find it very useful to append the letter d for the past tense, the letter g for the -ing form, and the letter s for third person singular verb present tense conjugation OR noun plural. I use ggd, ggg, and ggs for changed, changing, and changes, respectively.
• ii: iOS. I type iOS often, and want to bypass the occasionally offered "ups" correction which is seemingly built into iOS, or at least iOS 5.
• jj: just.
• nn: agaiN.
• oo: only.
• qq: when. From the French quand.
• tt: (). From the French parenThèses, which has a t sound for the th; I'm using pp for something else.
• uu: you.
• ww: with. I also use the natural "wo" keyboard shortcut for "without".
• xx: rest. From the Chinese verb 休息 xiūxi, although it is both noun/verb in English. believe; from the Chinese verb 相信 xiāngxìn.
• zz: sleep. Even if three or more z's might be more common usage having an informal association with sleep.

For my usage, these tuple keyboard shortcuts can't be separated from non-tuples. That is, I have keyboard shortcuts whose expansions are somehow related to each other, but some of them are tuples and some are not (like "ww" and "wo" above). I have many more keyboard shortcuts based on non-tuples. Examples include:

• amt: amount.
• wx: I think. First two letters of wǒ xiǎng Pinyin syllables for an equivalent 我想 Chinese expression.
• ya: there is. y a is short for il y a in French, which means "there is/are".

SERIOUS WARNING:
In iOS 5, there is inadequate protection against mapping the same shortcut twice. You can avoid doing that by first checking to see if you already have a keyboard shortcut with the name you are seeking to save (which might be new, or a [potentially dangerous] renaming of an existing one). If the expansion phrases differ, the last one assigned apparently trumps the other. If the expansion phrases are the same, your ability to access Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts probably broke, and you will may need to restore your device from a backup to regain that, though existing keyboard shortcuts likely still work. On one occasion, after deleting an unintentionally duplicated keyboard shortcut (deleting one removed them both; they were adjacent to each other in the list) and experiencing the just-described breakage (keyboard shortcuts still worked), I ejected all apps from RAM, powered off and on my iPod, and was again able to access Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Those are my recollections (probably reasonably accurate) of my own troublesome experiences; I did not test to verify them for this blog entry.
6/17/14: The unexpected duplication occurs if you have an extant Phrase without a keyboard shortcut, then edit it to make a keyboard shortcut. Delete it and recreate it to avoid the problem (which, as I described, is still fixable). I consider this an iOS 5 bug.

Imitating "Do Not Disturb" in iOS 5

iOS versions later than 5 include a Do Not Disturb feature to keep your device from sounding audible alerts (or, I believe, from potentially vibrating, for iPhones).

The following workaround solution serves me well, though on my 4th generation iPod I normally allow ("suffer") only these items to sound audible alerts:

• Calendar
• iMessages
• iOS: Low Battery (20% of remaining battery alert)
• iOS: beep when starting to charge

Another relevant aspect is that I have gotten very used to seeing the same Apple-supplied wallpaper design on my Home Screen, probably starting from late 2011 when I upgraded from iOS 4 to 5.

I needed a way to frequently switch the iPod to be silent and, equally importantly, to have a way to remember to switch it back later, to once again sound audible alerts.

That requires doing two things:

• Sounds > Ringer and Alerts: Set the volume slider all the way to the left (silent).
• Wallpaper: Temporarily choose a design that I would notice immediately, so I would know that something was different from what I consider to be the iPod's normal state of playing audible alerts. I chose one that I consider rather garish, which naturally attracts my attention. That leads me to rectify things quickly if I actually want audible alerts but the wallpaper indicates that I'd previously muted them. I change the wallpaper on the Home Screen only; you might choose Lock Screen as well.

Occasionally, despite my having muted the alerts, the iPod still sounds a quiet beep when starting to charge, which I imagine is due to a bug. That hasn't been a problem for me.

Normally, I put the Ringer and Alerts volume slider underneath the S in the Sounds screen heading, which is generally a good volume level for me. Periodically I need to set the volume louder than that, for which I choose another different wallpaper design, one which also easily catches my attention. That combination is the "Really Disturb" configuration.

I expect that the times when I forget to toggle the audible alerts appropriately with this workaround would still occur even if I were using a higher iOS version's official Do Not Disturb functionality.


See here for why I prefer iOS 5.

Chinese vocabulary for airplane flights

• airline 航空公司 hángkōng gōngsī
• flight 班機 bānjī
• plane ticket 機票 jīpiào
• boarding pass 登機證 dēngjīzhèng
• airport 機場 jīchǎng
• to take off (plane) 起飛 qǐfēi
• to land (plane) 降落 jiàngluò
• customs 海關 hǎiguān

Odd and even numbers in Chinese

I don't often need to know the words for odd and even in Chinese, but I finally decided to try to commit them to memory. It took me a bit of effort to find a mnemonic that would help me remember which was which:

• odd number 奇數 jī shù
• even number 偶數 ǒu shù

First I was hoping that the Pinyin letters, e.g., that the number of letters in one (ideally in "odd") would actually be odd and the other even. No such luck there, since they're both two letters.

Then I hoped that the Pinyin tone would be odd (ideally in "odd") would be an odd number and the other even. Again, no such luck, since they're first and third.

Finally I realized that the character for odd (referring to number) is also the character for strange/odd (which is, however, pronounced differently, as qí), and I had my mnemonic.

Converting Notespark data to Simplenote

Notespark app users like myself face the scheduled 12/31/13 closure of the Notespark service. I am currently converting to other apps and services, but my commentary may help others with their own choices. When I was able to grab chunks of time, I painstakingly converted the majority (over 1000) of my Notespark data (notes and tags) manually via copy-and-paste into Simplenote clients using the Simplenote service. During that work, I unexpectedly stumbled upon this prescient 6/8/13 Notespark note to myself: "Simplenote might be a viable substitute (which actually may have a superior search capability) if Notespark server ever disappears".

I have also already bulk-converted a mutually exclusive subset of my Notespark data (about 400 notes) into a paired PlainText WriteRoom app + Dropbox app and service solution, about which I hope to write in a future blog entry. Those notes are understandably not connected to my Simplenote data, so cannot share tags (or the quasi-equivalent). There are issues with using Chinese vocabulary notes (I had bulk-converted over 200) in this solution, but there seem to be some viable workarounds; hopefully I won't later have to switch them to Simplenote via manual copy-and-paste.

This blog entry, moreso than any others here, will likely be subject to frequent updates, at least until 12/31/13. I'll try to add immediately below, in reverse chronological order, dated summaries of materially significant updates, if I don't incorporate them into a more suitable place further below.
11/21/13: Changed my other solution mentioned above from PlainText to WriteRoom from the same developer. The latter was serendipitously temporarily free during my investigations, and it has more features (and no ads!). (11/17/14: I discovered rather late that in a 1/6/14 blog entry, the developer announced that he would stop selling both of those iOS apps, mentioning PlainText 2 by 433 Labs as a replacement for both. That is likely to be my solution at whatever point I can no longer use [probably due to an iOS upgrade] my 3.3.5 version of Simplenote.)
11/18/13: Described my workaround for keeping the contents of Trash (and device-local notes) in sync across iPod and iPad.
11/16/13: Recently finished this data conversion. Updating and adding various details (including, among other things, starting my promised list of web client issues, and further discussing ResophNotes), and expect to continue doing so for a while yet.
11/9/13: This blog entry first posted. Due to time constraints, I'm leaving out a number of already-known details, but hope to add them later.

Particulars about my situation

For the "Your Mileage May Vary" department.

Note data

1. More than 1500 Notespark notes, most of which I want to keep.
2. About 60 Notespark tags; many notes have multiple tags.
3. Used + (plus character) in some tag names, including as the final character. With hindsight, using + was a bad choice, which also led to some (rare) inconsistent behavior in Notespark. When converting, I would have done better to switch to some other "regular" character when I created the analogous Simplenote tag; I had to deal with tag fallout from not having done so. I found it difficult/impossible (had to do it more than once, and I don't remember all details) to delete such a tag (and also, later, my test tag [zz上面z] which contained Chinese characters) from the iOS app unless I first changed its name to have only "regular" characters (e.g., from "A+" to "Aplus").

Hardware and software

1. iPod 4th generation (primary iOS device for note usage)
2. iPad 2
3. Older, weaker PC running Windows XP is my primary computer. With Firefox/Chome/Opera browsers, that seemed to be unable to effectively use the Simplenote web client after I had loaded several hundred notes. Although I've only done a small number of tests, ResophNotes looks promising as an alternate client; I'm using the portable 1.5.7 version. When editing a larger note, I sometimes find it helpful to write it, or at least part of it, separately in a text editor (e.g., an older version of EmEditor Free or Notepad++) to avoid the lag that comes with syncing to the Simplenote server; I did the same thing with respect to the Notespark server. When I'm finished, I copy the new text into ResophNotes (or Notespark's web interface previously). The ResophNotes programmer welcomes donations to support future development; it's already been very useful to me and I'm convinced it will continue to be, so I contributed.
   
   Related comments: http://help.simplenote.com/customer/portal/questions/1479733-simplenote-on-www-and-resophnote-unusable-slow
4. Staying with iOS 5.1.1 because of particular functionality which is lost in iOS 6 (and presumably iOS 7 as well).
5. As a consequence of (4), using the older 3.3.5 version of the Simplenote app (the newest version which runs under iOS 5).
6. Using the older 1.3.2 version of the Notespark app. I seemed to have better results with it than with 1.4, the latest version (although all versions have been removed from the Apple App Store in anticipation of the closure of the Notespark service).

Note management functionality important to me

Having a clear idea of what's important can help you decide where you're willing to accept compromises, which may include handling some of your note needs in other ways (e.g., using other software and/or services). I probably left out some note management functionality which is sufficiently basic that any "self-respecting" note management app would have it. My need/desire for the following functionality is what makes manually copying and pasting what may ultimately be more than 1000 notes worth doing.

1. iOS app with fast, efficient note management, limited to text only. Extra features like text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) would probably impede my own note usage.
2. Ability to sync data from iPod/iPad to a "master" data copy on a server over wifi; that master data copy serves as an ongoing backup.
3. Ongoing consistent data across different client software.
4. Ability to view notes grouped by tag.
5. Ability to apply multiple tags to a single note (traditional folder-type grouping of notes is not ideal).
6. Ability to search through notes, ideally either as a tagged group or all notes, for one or more text strings.
7. Web client which enables copying text into and out of any note in the master data copy on the server.
8. Ability to bulk-export a local backup of data from either the master data copy on the server or from iPod/iPad. The Notespark service is closing; one must be prepared for a future similar occurrence which would force you to again find a replacement solution.
9. Ability to handle French (ideally Spanish as well), Chinese characters, and Chinese "Pinyin-toned" vowels (e.g., the ā and ē in kāfēi), which presumably means Unicode.
10. Avoid the need for notes to be created as operating system files. Such files require assignment/maintenance of a file name for each note, which is unnecessary and counterproductive for the way I use notes.

Some issues I encountered with the above:

Re: (2) above:

• When I copy-pasted 30 or so notes from Notespark to Simplenote without wifi, then later connected to wifi, I got 30 or so blank notes in Simplenote after that automatic sync. Now I try to avoid adding larger amounts of data when I lack a wifi connection, in hopes of minimizing such problems.

Re: (3) above, I unexpectedly found myself willing to accept shortcomings in ongoing data (note/tag) consistency.

• Fresh reloads of data from scratch often failed to load hundreds of notes. Perhaps their server load (and/or changing server configurations?) was a factor, but I sometimes saw, e.g., 89 total notes when hundreds more should have been loaded. After about a dozen or 20 fresh reloads, I finally got the proper, matching number of notes loaded onto my iPod and iPad. One tag was out of order on the iPad (11/15/13: and more have gotten out of order since), which I could live with (unfortunately, more got out of order later). I'm hoping to avoid needing fresh reloads as long as I can (perhaps until device hardware failure). The (beta) export capability (http://simplenote-export.appspot.com) may confirm that the service "knows" the correct number of notes, even if you can't get them to the iOS client reliably during fresh reloads. I haven't yet investigated http://ziptest-dot-simple-note.appspot.com, which is mentioned on the Simplenote blog here.
• Tag order often inconsistent across software clients. Simplenote allows you to order your tags (instead of alphabetically ordering them, as Notespark does), but Simplenote clients don't reliably order tags as they are ordered on the Simplenote server (at least I imagine the server has some defined order of tags). Each client might show tags in a different order.
• Tag duplicates sometimes showed up after I changed tag names and/or tag order.
• Blank tags sometimes appeared in the tag list.
• Sometimes, a note deleted while using a client other than the iPad (definitely at least using the iPod) had to be subsequently deleted on the iPad as well, although I believed it would/should have been deleted there by the automatic sync.
  
  11/18/13: To reduce (maybe even eliminate) chances of mismatched deleted notes on 2 (or more) iOS devices, create a special tag (e.g., ToDelete) and attach it to notes to be deleted on any device (or a combination thereof). Then, only when both devices are connected to the Internet and are both running Simplenote in the foreground, delete all those notes from each device as needed: I've experienced the full gamut of sync consistency. Once, it was sufficient to delete them from only one device, and they were properly deleted from the other device as well. On another occasion, all those notes needed to be deleted from both devices. On yet another occasion, deleting them all from one device deleted all but one of them from the other device. Finally, tap the Empty button in the Trash (which should only need to be done on one device, and the other[s] should automatically update).
• For note usage, the iPod is my primary device, so I make some effort to make note changes on it instead of on the iPad when I have a choice. My idea is that whenever note/tag inconsistency is introduced, it would be better to occur on my secondary note usage device, the iPad.

General user interface issues observed in the iOS app

1. On the iPod (though not less so on the iPad), impossible must be very fast and precise (much more so than in Notespark) to use the two-finger tap to select a line -- neither of your fingers should be moving appreciably up or down (or probably even side-to-side) when they contact the screen, and they can't linger on the screen, either (contact the screen and get off FAST). You can alternately use rapid quadruple tap to select a line. Possibly due to the automatic syncing and device sensitivity.
2. When creating a new note or editing an existing one, the "Tag:" input area is sometimes inaccessible, so it is impossible to assign any additional tags to a note. The solution that has worked for me is to quit the app, expel it from RAM, then restart it. I'm already used to using that workaround for recurring problems with Apple's Calendar app and other third party app(s), so doing so is second nature to me.
3. On the iPod, when pasting 5 lines of text into an existing note which had been accessed via a tag "folder", the note's single tag was lost. As in (2), the "Tag:" input area was blank and inaccessible, though I'm not sure if that occurred when the note was opened, or perhaps after the pasting in of text. Check your note's tag situation after you are done editing if you need to confirm its tag(s).
   
   11/16/13: Having at this point seen similar behavior on numerous occasions, I believe that when starting (or perhaps switching to) the app and opening a note, I believe the "Tag:" input area functionality can fail for any write operations (note/tag/pin). The reason for this might be that the device is running low on usable RAM. As long as you do not edit the note/its tags/its pinned status, the note will not lose its pre-existing tag(s), so there should be no need to fear tag loss if you are only reading the note. The fix is exactly as described for (2) immediately above.
4. On the iPod, I pasted text into a new tagged note (tagged by virtue of my having been in that tag's "folder" when I created the note), tapped the end of the first line, typed in a two word parenthesized phrase and was surprised to see Simplenote remove(!) the two word phrase. Amusingly, it was "(didn't happen)". This happened to me on another occasion, and I think the issue is that you should not do further edits if you see the rotating "throbber" reflecting ongoing syncing activity.
5. I wish they had put the Settings button in the upper right corner (which is empty) instead of in the upper left, and for that screen had left the upper left corner as a no-operation zone. The upper left corner is the same place shared by the Back button (on a preceding screen). The Back button doesn't necessarily effect a prompt change in the app (and after being tapped, the button's visible appearance changes only a modest amount), leading me to sometimes tap that area twice, wondering if I actually made a proper first tap. The app's delayed response often enough means that I land in Settings instead of simply back one level. Notespark's equivalent tap-functionality was better designed: the Note*spark and the All Notes/Starred/Tags/Shared/Trash buttons occupied the upper left corner, but Settings was in the upper right corner. Notespark's speed of response when tapping those buttons was also normally/always immediate, which meant I would never tap such buttons twice just to make sure that the app had registered a tap.
6. On the iPad, when using landscape orientation, you can't always get to the lower ones if you have a larger number of tags. The fix that worked for me was to temporarily switch the iPad's orientation to portrait, then switch back to landscape.

(More issues to be filled in later. This list is intended to be separate from issues with data consistency, which I should have listed earlier in this blog entry.)

General user interface issues observed in the web app

1. If a tag contains Chinese characters, when you create a new note while inside that tag "folder", everything from the first Chinese character on in the tag is inserted into the note.
   
   Aside: if you name such tags with an ASCII character[s] at the beginning, e.g., zz上面z [ZZ Top, ha ha], you will be able to add such tags even from a browser where you lack access to enter Chinese characters. I added the trailing z to zz上面z to test if that would change the above-mentioned behavior, but it didn't.

(More to be filled in later. This list is intended to be separate from issues with data consistency, which I should have listed earlier in this blog entry.)

Miscellaneous comments

1. No way to see all notes lacking a tag (unlike Notespark's untagged "pseudo-tag"). This is more of a problem because of both item (2) above in General user interface issues observed in the iOS app, which can lead to your inadvertently making a note without a tag (though not for lack of trying to add such a tag), and also because my belief is that more than one of my notes has seemingly lost a tag for no obvious reason. The ResophNotes Windows client mentioned above has a "No-Tag Notes" pseudo-tag through which you can see such notes, which is helpful. (6/4/14: Per http://help.simplenote.com/customer/portal/questions/5820090-can-we-have-a-no-tag-filter-, tag:untagged works on the website.)
2. Note-pinning capability, which keeps notes at the top of all others, can be more useful to me than Notespark's note-starring capability, e.g., to keep a frequently modified grocery shopping list near the top of All Notes. As part of my conversion from Notespark, I discovered I had starred so many notes that the star had become largely meaningless for some (primarily older notes, which had aged out of my usual "radar screen" of notes -- out of sight, out of mind). Pinning does change the Modified date of notes, which can affect you if you are using that characteristic for ordering of notes (Notespark starring did not affect the By date sort order).
3. Unlike Notespark, has in-note search, which has unfortunately proven rather buggy in my experience (1/13/14: It appears that if a note is "long" [not sure what the character count threshold for "long" is], the in-note search fails to highlight occurrences of the search string in it, although Simplenote should correctly have returned the list of notes that do have the search string in them. If all your notes were "long", the functionality would be no more than what is in Notespark). My using "more-rarely-used" ASCII characters and/or Chinese characters in my notes might be causing or contributing to this problem. (Evernote highlights all occurrences of the search string within a note).
4. Functionality differs between iOS client and web client; sometimes one can fix an issue that the other cannot.

Other recommendations

Make yourself one or more Simplenote accounts and do your own testing with a subset of the data you intend to import to better gauge how well it might work for you. I did preliminary testing that way, which guided my subsequent real conversion efforts. Simplenote's account deletion process seems to be quite thorough and complete; I think I made and deleted the same test account (defined to be associated with an e-mail address) about half a dozen times. Regrettably, my preliminary testing did not reveal all of the issues I would eventually face.

If you're manually converting hundreds of notes, it's probably most reasonable to convert them in groups (tagged groups, presumably). If you want to preserve at least the chronological order of last update from Notespark, copy and paste the notes into Simplenote from oldest to newest; when doing so on iOS, take advantage of Notespark's left/up triangle button to go to the previous note (presuming you sort your notes By date).

If you're keeping notes about the conversion during the conversion, keep them in Notespark instead of in Simplenote. That presumes that you're satisfied with Notespark to date and that Simplenote is new to you. I did not think of this aspect when I started my conversion, and to some extent regretted keeping some such notes in Simplenote, where I was bitten on multiple occasions by unexpected, sometimes inconsistent, behavior.

Browse their Support Center at http://help.simplenote.com; you might find (or provide!) some useful information.

Less frequently encountered Pinyin combinations

There are indubitably charts detailing all possible Pinyin combinations (ignoring tones). Having a fair amount of experience with Chinese, I'm interested when in everyday usage I encounter combinations of which I haven't previously known. It's sort of like when you first learn that there's a country called Qatar, and you realize that the letter q isn't always followed by the letter u.

jiong:
I saw this in an e-mail message as part of someone's name, and although the Chinese character wasn't included, I imagine it was 炯 (jiǒng; bright, shining)

miu:
荒謬 (huāngmiù; absurd)