already told you how to train your digits to use Touch ID. Well, your fingers play a prominent role throughout your iPhone experience, tapping, flicking, pinching, and dragging. Fortunately, these gestures are not challenging, so you’ll be mastering many of the iPhone’s features in no time:
● Tap: Tapping serves multiple purposes, as becomes evident throughout this book. You can tap an icon to open an app from the Home screen. Tap to start playing a song or to choose the photo album you want to look through. Sometimes you’ll double-tap (tapping twice in rapid succession), which has the effect of zooming in (or out) of web pages, maps, and emails.
● Flick: A flick of the finger on the screen itself lets you quickly scroll through lists of songs, emails, and picture thumbnails. Tap the screen to stop scrolling, or merely wait for the list to stop scrolling.
● Pinch/spread: On a web page or picture, pinch your fingers together to shrink the image, or spread your fingers apart to enlarge the image. Pinching and spreading (or what we call unpinching) are cool gestures that are easy to master and sure to wow an unfamiliar audience.
● Drag: Slowly press your finger against the touchscreen and then, without lifting your finger, move it. You might drag to move around a map that’s too large for the iPhone’s display area.
A gesture called reachability helps owners of the larger-display iPhones. By gently double-tapping (but not double-pressing) the Home button, the top portion of the screen shifts toward the bottom of the display so that you can tap icons and items that were previously out of reach. The purpose of this gesture is to help you use these phones with one hand.
Understanding Pressure-Sensitive Touch
Speaking of feel, the arrival of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus a few years ago introduced iPhone owners to new pressure-sensitive technology known as 3D Touch, essentially your phone recognizing force. The feature was eventually added to subsequent models. Put another way, the amount of pressure you apply when touching the display changes the outcome of what happens on the screen.
For example, if you press against an email in your Mail inbox, you can peek at the message. Press harder and in Apple parlance you have been popped into the content itself (in this instance, you’d be able to do all the things that you’d do with a Mail message, a subject for Chapter 12). Thus Apple coined the phrase peek and pop.
On the Home screen, you can use 3D Touch to employ shortcuts, including taking a selfie, marking a location in Maps, and searching for what’s nearby. Apple calls these shortcuts quick actions. As mentioned, you can also employ 3D Touch to interact with notifications inside Notification Center.
As you discover later, you can use 3D Touch also in apps such as Mail or Notes to transform your on-screen keyboard into a trackpad.
This force-touch technology is baked into iOS 10 on compatible iPhones, so you’ll find yourself using it in many ways. And though there’s a bit of learning curve before you get the hang of it, we think you’ll get comfortable soon enough. Apple tries to help by giving you tactile feedback along the way.
Mastering the Multitouch Interface
The iPhone, like most smartphones nowadays, dispenses with physical buttons in favor of a multitouch display. (The iPhone was a pioneer in popularizing multitouch.) This display is the heart of many things you do on the iPhone, and the controls change depending on the task at hand.
Unlike some other phones with touchscreens, don’t bother looking for a stylus. You are meant, instead – at the risk of lifting another ancient ad slogan – to “let your fingers do the walking.”
It’s important to note that you have at your disposal several keyboard layouts in English, all variations on the alphabetical keyboard, the numeric and punctuation keyboard, and the more punctuation and symbols keyboard. Three keyboards are shown in Figure 2-1 in the Notes app and three in Safari.
FIGURE 2-1: Six faces of the iPhone keyboard.
The layout you see depends on which toggle key you tapped and the app that you are working in. For instance, the keyboards in Safari differ from the keyboards in Notes, sometimes in subtle ways. For example, note in Figure 2-1 that the Notes keyboards have a Return key in the lower right, but the Safari keyboards have a Go key in that position.
FIGURE 2-2: Going wide on the keyboard.
The iPhone keyboard contains a number of keys that don’t type a character (refer to Figure 2-2). These special-use keys follow:
❯❯ Shift key: Switches between uppercase and lowercase letters if you’re using the alphabetical keyboard. If you’re using keyboards that show only numbers and symbols, the traditional shift key is replaced by a key labeled #+= or 123. Pressing that key toggles between keyboards that have just symbols and numbers.
❯❯ Toggle key: Switches between the different keyboard layouts.
❯❯ International keyboard key: Shows up with a globe on the face of the key only if you’ve turned on an international keyboard, as explained in the sidebar titled “A keyboard for all borders,” later in this chapter. If you haven’t selected an international keyboard, this key displays an emoji instead, as explained in the next item.
Note: When you select a keyboard in a different language – or English for that matter – you can select different software keyboard layouts (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTX) and a hardware keyboard layout (if you connect a hardware keyboard via Bluetooth).
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