Web Finger Tips on iPhone: Zooming and Scrolling

source: OReilly - iPhone The Missing Manual

These two gestures—zooming in on Web pages and then scrolling around them—have probably sold more people on the iPhone than any other demonstration. It all happens with a fluid animation, and a responsiveness to your finger taps, that’s positively addicting. Some people spend all day just zooming in and out of Web pages on the iPhone, simply because they can.

When you first open a Web page, you get to see the entire thing. Unlike most cellphones, the iPhone crams the entire Web site onto its 3.5-inch screen, so you can get the lay of the land. At this point, of course, you’re looking at .004-point type, which is too small to read unless you’re a microbe. So the next step is to magnify the part of the page you want to read.
The iPhone offers three ways to do that:

• Rotate the iPhone. Turn the device 90 degrees in either direction. The iPhone rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view. (see image below)
  
• Do the two-finger spread. Put two fingers on the glass and drag them apart. The Web page stretches before your very eyes, growing larger. Then you can pinch to shrink the page back down again. (Most people do several spreads or several pinches in a row to achieve the degree of zoom they want.)
• Double-tap. Safari is intelligent enough to recognize different chunks of a Web page. One article might represent a chunk. A photograph might qualify as a chunk. When you double-tap a chunk, Safari magnifies just that chunk to fill the whole screen. It’s smart and useful. Double-tap again to zoom back out.

Once you’ve zoomed out to the proper degree, you can then scroll around the page by dragging or flicking with a finger. You don’t have to worry about “clicking a link” by accident; if your finger’s in motion, Safari ignores the tapping action, even if you happen to land on a link.

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iPhone: Seven Basic Finger Techniques

The way you operating The iPhone is quite different compare with other machine. You do everything on the touch screen instead of with physical buttons. Here’s what you need to know.

Tap
You’ll do a lot of tapping on the iPhone’s on-screen buttons. They’re usually nice and big, giving your fleshy fingertip a fat target. You can’t use a stylus, fingernail, or pen tip; only skin contact works.

Drag
When you’re zoomed into a map, Web page, email, or photo, you scroll around just by sliding your finger across the glass in any direction—like a flick (see below), but slower and more controlled. It’s a huge improvement over scroll bars, especially when you want to scroll diagonally.

Slide
In some situations, you’ll be asked to confirm an action by sliding your finger across the screen. That’s how you unlock the phone’s buttons after it’s been in your pocket, for example. It’s ingenious, really; you may bump the touch screen when you reach into your pocket for something, but it’s extremely unlikely that your knuckles will randomly slide it in just the right way.

You also have to swipe to confirm that you want to turn off the iPhone, to answer a call on a locked iPhone, or to shut off an alarm. Swiping like this is also a great shortcut for deleting an email or text message.

Flick
A flick is a fast, less controlled slide. You flick vertically to scroll lists on the iPhone. You’ll discover, usually with some expletive like “Whoa!” or “Jeez!,” that scrolling a list in this way is a blast. The faster your flick, the faster the list spins downward or upward. But lists have a real-world sort of momentum; they slow down after a second or two, so you can see where you wound up.

At any point during the scrolling of the list, you can flick again (if you didn’t go far enough) or tap to stop the scrolling (if you see the item you want to choose).

Pinch and Spread
In the Photos, Mail, Web, and Google Maps programs, you can zoom in on a photo, message, Web page, or map by spreading.

That’s when you place two fingers (usually thumb and forefinger) on the glass and spread them. The image magically grows, as though it’s printed on a sheet of rubber.

Once you’ve zoomed in like this, you can then zoom out again by putting two fingers on the glass and pinching them together.

Double-Tap
Double-tapping is actually pretty rare on the iPhone, at least among the programs supplied by Apple. It’s not like the Mac or Windows, where doubleclicking the mouse always means “open.” Because the iPhone’s operating system is far more limited, you open something with one tap.

A double tap, therefore, is reserved for three functions:

• In Safari (the Web browser), Photos, and Google Maps programs, doubletapping zooms in on whatever you tap, magnifying it.
• In the same programs, as well as Mail, double-tapping means, “restore to original size” after you’ve zoomed in.
• When you’re watching a video, double-tapping switches aspect ratios (video screen shape)

Two-Finger Tap
This weird little gesture crops up only in one place: in Google Maps. It means “zoom out.” To perform it, you tap once on the screen—with two fingers.

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