TUAW Tips: iPhone Safari Navigation Tricks

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!

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.

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.

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!

"Jump to the top" (tip #2) does not require a double-tap; a single-tap works just fine.

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.

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").

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.)

Anyone know how to force a link to open in a tab?

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.