Filed under: TUAW Tips, iPhone
TUAW Tips: iPhone Safari Navigation Tricks
The iPhone offers some delightful navigation tricks in Safari. Here are a few of my favorites for you to enjoy and to use while scrolling though webpages:
Page down. When not using a zoomed-in display, double-tap towards the bottom of the screen. The page will re-center around your tap. Make sure not to tap a link!
Jump to the top. Double-tap the very top of the screen, just below the time display to pop back to the top of the page. (Thanks John C)
Zoom onto a single picture. Double-tapping images in Safari zooms them to fit your iPhone display. If the picture is linked to a URL, this can prove a little tricky but it works great for non-linked images. Double-tap again to return to the unzoomed display.
Zoom a column. You can zoom text columns as well as pictures. Double-tap on the column to fit it to the display. Double-tap again to return out of the zoom. Not only does Safari zoom block-quoted text independently of regular text but if you move your finger after the first double-tap-to-fit, it interprets the next double-tap as a re-center page command rather than a return-to-previous-zoom. Smart.
Stopping a scroll. After flicking a page to get it to scroll, you can tap the page at any time to stop that movement. Don't forget, you can also manually drag the screen display to reset the part you're viewing.
Manual zoom. This is probably one of the most-advertised Safari features (along with the flip-the-phone-on-its-side-trick) but it's worth mentioning again. To zoom into a Safari page, put your thumb and forefinger on the screen and move them apart. To zoom out, pinch the fingers together after starting with them apart.
Examining the URL. To peek at a link's destination, touch and hold the link for a few seconds. You can also do this with images to see if they are linked. If a link appears and you don't want to activate it, just slide your finger away until the destination text disappears.
Got some more tricks to add? Let us know in the comments.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Sample said 4:35PM on 7-05-2007
One more to mention; The iPhone also 'locks' your scroll to either vertical or horizontal only if the initial finger-slide is straight up/down or right/left enough. This can be very useful if you've got a skinny column of text with room on either side to get derailed.
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Michael Strutton said 5:04PM on 7-05-2007
My experience, using 2 fingers to double tap, and zoom a section of a web page will avoid the accidental clicking of links....
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Michael Strutton said 5:07PM on 7-05-2007
One more - using 2 fingers side by side will force vertical scrolling. Likewise 2 fingers stacked is horizontal.
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Billy K said 5:39PM on 7-05-2007
Has anyone figured out how to save or email an image from iPhone Safari? I suspect there's an easy way to do this and I am too thick-headed to figure it out.
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John said 7:00PM on 7-05-2007
Anyone know how to force a link to open in a tab?
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John Sample said 7:03PM on 7-05-2007
re: previous two comments: sadly, no I don't think so, Apple didn't put them in. (Personal speculation here, but my vibe from using the thing is that the original design spec for the UI was far more iPod-like in its input-to-output ratio. In fact, the iPhone is a all but a portable Mac, and people are using it as such. Omissions like this are very telling; there are a few other artifacts of former read-only-ness are buried here and there. My guess is they'll show up quietly and soon since any fanfare would highlight their absence in the 1.0 release.)
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matt said 9:59PM on 7-05-2007
I know the 'open link in new tab' issue has been mentioned before, and my apologies if this has already been suggested/hoped for, but I think a good solution without adding more buttons would be if you tapped and held the "new page" button and then tapped your desired link. And for simplicity's sake, allowing it to work vice-versa, too (hold link, tap "new page").
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R2B2 said 10:12PM on 7-05-2007
I would love to see a tap and hold contextual menu. This could be the key to many missing features such as copy/paste, open link in new page, save photo to library, etc.
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mark said 4:07AM on 7-06-2007
"Jump to the top" (tip #2) does not require a double-tap; a single-tap works just fine.
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Dan said 5:25PM on 7-06-2007
I have noticed that if there is a frame or text window that should have it own scroll bar it does not on iPhone.
However, if you tap and hold with one finger in the field, then use another finger to scroll, you can scroll within the field.
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doug said 4:06PM on 7-08-2007
Just found a great trick for viewing documents on the iphone. Save the document on your computer as a .doc, .xml, or pdf. Email it to your gmail account. Use your web browser to log into your igoogle page, and view your gmail from there. For quick future access, be sure to bookmark the address of each document that you view.
You can also create html pages from the google docs application. When saved they're displayed in the spreadsheet and docs window on your igoogle page.
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Canute Temu said 7:52AM on 7-09-2007
It is great to note that the iphone has a feature, Safari Navigation, from the Kiswahili Language of East Africa! Good for the popularization of Kiswahili!
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arumdev said 10:00AM on 11-25-2007
Posted at 5:25PM on Jul 6th 2007 by Dan
" I have noticed that if there is a frame or text window that should have it own scroll bar it does not on iPhone.
However, if you tap and hold with one finger in the field, then use another finger to scroll, you can scroll within the field."
Dan, I have not been able to replicate this with the method you describe. However i can get it to work by scrolling in the section with two fingers.
thanks for pointing me to that!
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