Later, I home in on how to make the most of the keyboard.
Training your digits
Rice Krispies have Snap! Crackle! Pop! Apple’s response for the iPad is Tap! Flick! Pinch!
Fortunately, tapping, flicking, and pinching are not challenging gestures, so you can master many of the iPad’s features in no time:
Tap: Use any finger to lightly press on and release the iPad screen. Tapping is the single most important element of multitouch interfaces. Tap to open, tap to play, tap to select, tap to shoot (in games).
Double-tap: Tap the screen twice in rapid succession. This action usually has the effect of zooming into (or out of) what's on the screen (such as a web page, map, or email).
Long-press: Place a finger on a screen object and leave your finger there until the desired action occurs (such as a menu of options appearing). This gesture is also called press and hold or tap and hold.
Flick: Quickly swipe a finger along the screen. Flicking lets you scroll through lists of songs, emails, and picture thumbnails. Tap the screen to stop scrolling, or wait for the scrolling list to stop.
Pinch/spread: Place two fingers on the screen and pinch them together to zoom out of images, web pages, text, videos, and more. Or spread the fingers apart to zoom in on things. These gestures will quickly become second nature!
Drag: Place a finger on a screen object and then move the finger along the screen. The object moves along with your finger.
Swipe downward from the top center of the screen: This special gesture displays notifications. Place your finger at the very top of the screen and drag downward.
Swipe downward from the top right of the screen: This time, you’re calling up Control Center, a handy repository for controls related to music, airplane mode (see Chapter 15), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, do not disturb, mute, volume, orientation lock, timer (Clock app), camera, AirPlay, and brightness. Check out Figure 2-2 for one view of Control Center.
Swipe downward in the middle of any screen: Display the search feature, a discussion for later in this chapter.
Swipe from left to right on the first Home screen page: Summon the Today screen, where you see the appointments and reminders you have coming up, get app suggestions and News stories, and access the search feature. The today view is available on the lock screen and the Home screens.
Swipe from right to left on the lock screen: Summon the iPad’s camera app.
Swipe up from the bottom of the screen: Open App Switcher, which enables you to quickly switch among or view running apps (see the later section, “Multitasking”). You can also use App Switcher to quit an app by dragging the app’s thumbnail above the top of the screen.
Later in the chapter, you read about a couple of other ways to employ your digits: slide over and split views.
FIGURE 2-2: I think you’ll call on Control Center a lot.
Navigating beyond the main Home screen page
As I discuss in Chapter 1, by default your iPad comes with two Home screen pages, indicated by the row of two tiny dots that appear just above the dock. After you start adding apps from the App Store (see Chapter 10), that row might expand to three or more dots. Each dot denotes a Home screen page, each of which can contain up to 30 additional icons (depending on your iPad model), not counting the additional icons on your iPad’s dock. You can have up to 15 Home screen pages. You can also have more or fewer icons on your dock, but I can’t think of a decent reason why you’d want to ditch any of them. In any case, more on these in a moment.
Here’s what you need to know about navigating among the Home screen pages:
To navigate between pages, flick from right to left or left to right across the middle of the screen or tap directly on the dots. The number of dots you see represents the current number of Home screen pages on your iPad. The all-white dot denotes the page you’re currently viewing. Flicking from left to right from the first Home screen page brings up the aforementioned Today screen.
Make sure you flick and not just tap, or you’ll probably open one of the apps on the current screen instead of switching pages.
If your iPad has a Home button, press the Home button to jump back to the Home screen. You can also swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Doing so the first time takes you back to the last-viewed Home screen page. A second time takes you to the first Home screen page.
You can now put as many as 15 apps and as few as none on the dock. The dock also shows the three most recently opened apps on the right side of the divider line, making for a quick return to an app. (If you don't see recent apps on the dock, launch Settings, tap Home Screen & Dock, and then tap the Show Suggested and Recent Apps in Dock switch to on.) You can access the dock from an open app by swiping up a short way from the bottom of your screen.
Select, cut, copy, and paste
You can select and copy (or cut) content from one place on the iPad and then paste it elsewhere, just like you can with a Mac or PC. You might copy text or a URL from the web and paste it into an email or a note. Or you might copy a bunch of pictures or video into an email.
Here’s how you to exploit the copy-and-paste feature:
1 Select a word by tapping and holding down on it or double-tapping it.iPadOS selects the word and displays the Edit menu just above the selection. If you don’t see the Edit menu, tap the selection.
2 Drag the grab points (also called grab handles) to select a larger or smaller block of text.The grab points, which are vertical lines connected to circles, appear to the left and right of the selected text, as shown in Figure 2-3. The tininess of the grab points means that dragging them may take a little practice.
3 Tap Copy.If you were deleting text from a document you created, instead of copying and pasting, you would tap Cut instead.FIGURE 2-3: Drag the grab handles to select text.
4 Open the app into which you want to paste the copied text.
5 Position the cursor where you want to insert the text you just copied, and then tap the cursor.Up pops the Edit menu, a version of which is shown in Figure 2-4. (The commands you see vary by app.)
6 Tap Paste to paste the text into the document.
FIGURE 2-4: Tap Paste and text will appear.
