Learn gestures

- One of the most important skills you need to really use your iOS device like a pro is to understand gestures. The majority of the actions you'll perform with your device are accomplished by tapping, sliding, rotating or pinching your fingers on the screen. In this video, I want to go over the basic moves. There are only a few of them, but they're part of the DNA of using iOS devices, and it's essential to really learn them well. The most basic gesture is the tap, and it's just what it sounds like. You tap part of the screen to perform some action. A complete tap includes both when you touch the screen, and when you lift your finger off the screen.

You don't want to hold down too long on certain buttons, or else you may activate a different feature or option. So for example, I can tap on any of these applications here on my home screen to run them, like, for example, Photos. So here I am, looking at my photo library. Now, we'll cover how to get pictures into your device in a later chapter, but here I want to select the album I want to look at, again, by tapping it. So, for example, I'll go into Camera Roll. Now I'm looking at thumbnails of all the photos in this album. The next gesture is the drag, and again, this is just what it sounds like.

To browse through these photos, I keep my finger in contact with the screen, and drag the thumbnails up and down. If I run out of room as I'm dragging, I just lift my finger off the screen, and start dragging near the top of the screen again. Now, closely associated with the drag gesture is the flick. Dragging over and over again like this can get really tedious, especially if you have a lot of content to scroll through. In those cases, lift your finger off the screen as you reach the end of the drag. Notice the content on the screen continues to move.

And the greatest thing about flicking is that it's speed-sensitive, so I can flick slowly to browse at a leisurely pace, or if I know a photo I want to look at is somewhere near the top, I can flick quickly and the thumbnails go speeding by. Now, here's a little tip about scrolling in most iOS applications. If you tap the top of the screen where the time is displayed, you'll instantly scroll to the very top of the page. This doesn't work in every single app, but many of them do work this way. Alright, now let's select a photo by tapping it.

The next gesture is the pinch. This is when you touch two fingers, usually your thumb and index finger, to the screen and either separate them, which as you can see zooms in on the photo, or you bring them back together, which zooms back out. And we refer to this as "pinching in," and "pinching out." While zoomed in on a photo, notice I can also use the drag gesture, as well as the flick gesture.

Now, if I'm not zoomed in, dragging and flicking takes me from photo to photo. So now we understand the tap, the drag, the flick and pinching in and out, which are really the most basic and commmonly used gestures on iOS devices. Now, there are additional variations on these moves. For example, a quick double-tap on an item often zooms in on it. Here in Photos, it zooms in on the picture. Or, if you're browsing a website in the Safari web browser, double-tapping on a column of text zooms that column of text to the width of your screen.

Or, double-tapping a photo zooms in on that photo. There's also multi-finger tapping, which appears in apps like Maps. Here, double-tapping zooms in like we would expect, but to zoom out, you single-tap with two fingers. Pinching in and out is available here as well. Some apps require you not to tap, but to touch and hold an on-screen button to make it work. For example, if I touch and hold down any of the icons on my home screen, that puts them into organization mode, where I can then drag the icons from location to location to rearrange them as I like.

And I'll just press the Home button to turn off that mode. Now, if you have an iPhone 6S or later, if you press down on an icon here instead of just touching it, you may get additional options due to the 3D Touch feature that can detect the amount of pressure you're using on the screen. We'll talk about that in its own upcoming video. And you might come across other options that iPhone app developers have programmed into their apps, like two-finger dragging, two-finger rotating and so on. On the iPad, with its larger screen, you can even use four- and five-finger gestures. Generally, you'll be taught which gestures to use by the instructions that come with the app.

Alright, so there you have the basic finger gestures you'll need to know to really use iOS devices efficiently. We'll look more closely at various gestures as we work with specific applications.