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. 

Cameras and Flash

At the top of the phone, above the screen, there’s a horizontal slot. That’s the earpiece. Just above it (iPhone 5) or beside it (iPhone 4 or 4S), the tiny round pinhole is the front-facing camera. It’s a little bit more visible on the white iPhone than on the black one.

Its primary purpose is to let you conduct video chats using the FaceTime feature, but it’s also handy for taking self-portraits or just checking to see if you have spinach in your teeth.

Just keep in mind that it’s not nearly as good a camera as the one on the back. The front camera has no flash, isn’t as good in low light, and takes much lower-resolution shots (1.2 megapixels on the iPhone 5, only 0.3 megapixels on earlier models).

The camera on the back of the iPhone, meanwhile, takes very good photos indeed—8 megapixels on the iPhone 4S and 5. 

On the iPhone 4 and later, a tiny LED lamp appears next to this lens. It’s the flash for the camera, the video light when you’re shooting movies, and a darned good flashlight for reading restaurant menus and theater programs in low light. (A free app like LED Light makes it quick and easy to turn the light on and off.) 

On the iPhone 5, the tiny pinhole between the flash and the lens is a microphone. It’s used for recording clearer sound with video, for better noise cancellation on phone calls, and better directional sound pickup. 

Home Button

Here it is: the one and only button on the front of this phone. Push it to summon the Home screen, which is your gateway to everything the iPhone can do.

 Having a Home button is a wonderful thing. It means you can never get lost. No matter how deeply you burrow into the iPhone software, no matter how far off track you find yourself, one push of the Home button takes you back to the beginning.

It sounds simple, but remember that the iPhone doesn’t have an actual Back button or an End button. The Home button is the only way out of some screens.

As time goes on, Apple keeps saddling the Home button with more and more functions. It’s become Apple’s only way to provide shortcuts for common features; that’s what you get when you design a phone that only has one button. In iPhone Land, you can press the Home button one, two, or three times for different functions—or even hold it down. Here’s the rundown.

Quick Press: Wake Up 

Pressing the Home button once wakes the phone if it’s in locked mode. That’s sometimes easier than finding the Sleep switch on the top edge. It gives you a quick glance at your missed calls and texts—or the time and date. 

Long Press: Siri (or Voice Control) 

If you hold down the Home button for about 3 seconds, you make the phone ready for voice control. If you have an iPhone 3GS or 4, you can use voice control to dial by speaking a name or a number, or use it to control music playback. If you have an iPhone 4S or 5, you can do a thousand times more: You can command Siri, your virtual voice-controlled assistant.

Two Quick Presses: Task Switcher

If, once the phone is awake, you press the Home button twice quickly, the screen dims, and the current image on it slides upward—to reveal the task switcher strip at the bottom. This feature is the key to the iPhone’s multitasking feature. What you see here are icons of the four programs you’ve used most recently. Each time you swipe your finger to the left, you bring more icons into view, representing programs you opened less and less recently.

The point is that with a single tap, you can jump right back into a program you had open, without waiting for it to start up, show its welcome screen, and so on—and without having to scroll through 11 Home screens trying to find the icon of a favorite app. 

In short, the task switcher gives you a way to jump directly to another app, without a layover at the Home screen first. 

Two Quick Presses, Part 2: The Widget Bar

Most of the time, you’ll do the two-presses thing to open the task switcher so you can, well, switch tasks. But there are hidden gems awaiting. If you summon the task switcher and then drag your finger to the right, the task switcher reveals a set of four hidden controls. These go by the name of  widgets, meaning that they’re not quite as full blown as actual apps, but they still get their own icons. Here’s what they do, from left to right: 

•Rotation lock. 

When you tap this button, the screen no longer rotates when you turn the phone 90 degrees. The idea is that sometimes, like when you’re reading an ebook on your side in bed, you don’t want the screen picture to turn; you want it to stay upright relative to your eyes, even though you’re lying down. (A little m icon appears at the top of the screen to remind you why the usual rotating isn’t happening.) The whole thing isn’t quite as earth-shattering as it sounds—first, be- cause it locks the image in only one way: upright, in portrait orientation. You can’t make it lock into widescreen mode. Furthermore, there aren’t that many apps that rotate with the phone to begin with. But when that day comes when you want to read in bed on your side with your head on the pillow, your iPhone will be ready. (Tap the button a second time to turn rotating back on.) 

•«, ÷, ». 

These controls govern playback in whatever program is play- ing music in the background. They’re always two Home-button presses away, no matter what program you’re in. You can skip a horrible song quickly and efficiently without having to interrupt what you’re doing. 

•Music-app button. 

The app icon here represents your iPhone’s iPod app, or the Pandora Internet radio app, or the Spotify app, or whatever program is playing music in the background at the moment. Once again, the idea is to give you a quick shortcut when you want to switch albums, songs, or podcasts, so you don’t have to meander back to the Home screen. 

•Volume slider and AirPlay control. 

New in iOS 6: If you swipe again to the right from the music-playback controls, you reveal a volume slider and a button that lets you switch playback to a wireless speaker or Apple TV, courtesy of AirPlay 

Three Presses: VoiceOver, Zoom, White on Black…

In Settings>General>Accessibility, you can set up a triple-press of the Home button to turn one of several accessibility features on or off: VoiceOver (the phone speaks whatever you touch), Invert Colors (white-on-black type, which is sometimes easier to see), Zoom (magnifies the screen), AssistiveTouch (help for people who have trouble with physical switches) or Guided Access (aka kiosk mode). 

The Lock Screen

To wake the phone when it’s locked, press either the Sleep switch or the Home button just below the screen. That gesture alone doesn’t fire up the full iPhone world, though. Instead, it presents the Lock screen shown here. From here, slide your finger to the right across the gray arrow, as indicated by the animation, to unlock the phone, wake it up, and start using it.

These days, the Lock screen is more than just a big Do Not Disturb sign. It’s a veritable bulletin board for up-to-date information about your life—information you can scan without unlocking the phone at all. 

For starters, you can use the iPhone as a watch—millions of people do. Just tap the Sleep switch to consult the Lock screen’s time and date display, and then shove the phone right back into your pocket. The iPhone relocks after a few seconds. 

If you’re driving, using the Maps app to guide you, the Lock screen shows the standard navigation screen . Handy, really—the less fumbling you have to do while driving, the safer you are. Better yet, the Lock screen is a handy status screen. Here you see a record of everything that happened while you weren’t paying attention. It’s a list of missed calls, text messages received, notifications from your apps, and other essential information. 

Now, each of these notices has come from a different app (software program). To call somebody back, for example, you’d want to open the Phone app; to reply to a text message, you’d want the Messages app, and so on. 

Here, then, is a handy shortcut: You can dive directly into the relevant app by swiping your finger across the notification itself, like this:

Adopting that shortcut saves you the trouble of unlocking the phone, fum- bling through your Home screens until you find the app you want, and tap- ping it to open it.

NOTE: On the other hand, if you’d rather not have all these details show up on the Lock screen, you can turn them off. (Privacy is the main reason you might want to do so—remember that the bad guys don’t need a password to view your Lock screen. They just have to tap the Sleep switch or the Home button.)

You can hide these items from your Lock screen on an app-by-app basis. For example, you might want missed calls to show up here but not missed text messages. To set this up, choose SettingsÆNotifications. Tap the app in question; scroll to the bottom, and then turn off View in Lock Screen.

Locked Mode

When you don’t touch the screen for 1 minute (or another interval you choose), or when you put the iPhone to sleep, the phone locks itself. When it’s locked, the screen is dark and doesn’t respond to touch. If you’re on a call, the call continues; if music is playing, it keeps going; if you’re recording audio, the recording proceeds. But when the phone is locked, you don’t have to worry about accidental button pushes. You wouldn’t want to discover that your iPhone has been calling people or taking photos from the depths of your pocket or purse. Nor would you want it to dial a random number from your back pocket, a phenomenon that’s earned the unfortunate name butt dialing. 

Sleep Switch (On/Off)

On the top-right edge of the iPhone, you’ll find a metal button shaped like a dash. This, ladies and gents, is the Sleep switch.

It has several functions: 

• Sleep/Wake. Tapping it once puts the iPhone to sleep—into Standby mode, ready for incoming calls but consuming very little power. Tapping it again turns on the screen so it’s ready for action. 

• On/Off. The same switch can also turn the iPhone off completely so it consumes no power at all; incoming calls get dumped into voicemail. You might turn the iPhone off whenever you’re not going to use it for a few days. To turn the iPhone off, press the Sleep switch for 3 seconds. The screen changes to say slide to power off. Confirm your decision by placing a fin- gertip on the right-pointing red arrow and sliding to the right. The device shuts off completely. 

To turn the iPhone back on, press the switch again for 1 second. The chromelike Apple logo appears as the phone boots up. 

• Answer call/Dump to voicemail. When a call comes in, you can tap the Sleep button once to silence the ringing or vibrating. After four rings, the call goes to your voicemail. You can also tap it twice to dump the call to voicemail immediately. (Of course, because they didn’t hear four rings, iPhone veterans will know you’ve blown them off. Bruised egos may result. Welcome to the world of iPhone etiquette.) 

• Force restart. The Sleep switch has one more function. If your iPhone is frozen, and no buttons work, and you can’t even turn the thing off, this button is also involved in force-restarting the whole machine.