Seven Basic Finger Techniques

The iPhone isn’t quite like any machine that came before it, and operating it isn’t quite like using any 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 onscreen buttons. They’re usually nice and big, giving your fleshy fingertip a fat target. You can’t use a fingernail or a pen tip; only skin contact works. (OK, you can also buy an iPhone stylus. But a fingertip is cheaper and much harder to misplace.)

Swipe 

In some situations, you’ll be asked to confirm an action by swiping your finger across the screen. That’s how you unlock the phone 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 swipe 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 a text message.

Drag 

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

Flick 

A flick is a faster, 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 a 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 programs like Photos, Mail, Web, and Maps, 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.

Note: The english language has failed apple here. Moving your thumb and forefinger closer together has a perfect verb: pinching. But there’s no word to describe moving them the opposite direction.

apple uses the oxymoronic expression pinch out to describe that move (along with the redundant-sounding pinch in). in this book, the opposite of “pinching” is “spreading.”

Once you’ve zoomed in like this, you can 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 pro- grams supplied by Apple. It’s not like the Mac or Windows, where double- clicking 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 two functions:

 

• In the Safari (Web browser), Photos, and Maps programs, double- tapping zooms in on whatever you tap, magnifying it. (Double-tapping means “restore to original size” after you’ve zoomed in.) Double-tapping also zooms into some email messages—the ones formatted like Web pages—as well as PDF files, Microsoft Office files, and others. 

• When you’re watching a video (or recording one), double-tapping switches the aspect ratio (video screen shape). 

Two-Finger Tap 

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