iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Touchscreen Tips for Websites

The touchscreen operates much the same way in Safari as it does in the other iPhone apps. You can use it to scroll pages, zoom in and out, tap links, fill in forms, enter addresses, and more. The screen is remarkably fluid in its motion, and its response to your touch is neither hyperactive nor sluggish. It actually makes surfing the web a pleasure, which isn’t something you can say about most smartphones.

Here’s a little collection of touchscreen tips that ought to make your web excursions even easier:

Precision zooming. Zooming on the iPhone is straightforward: to zoom in, spread two fingers apart; to zoom out, pinch two fingers together. However, when you zoom in on a web page, it’s almost always because you want to zoom in on something. It might be an image, a link, a text box, or just a section of text. To ensure that your target ends up in the middle of the zoomed page, place your thumb and forefinger together on the section of the screen you want to zoom, then spread your thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in.

The old pan-and-zoom. Another useful technique for getting a target in the middle of a zoomed page is to zoom and pan at the same time. That is, as you spread (or pinch) your fingers, you also move them up, down, left, or right to pan the ...