One More Tap

I was out looking for some accessories for my new aluminium MacBook and happened to stumble upon a Starbucks outlet. Having missed Starbucks for a while now (yeah, I know they are expensive coffee, but we need to pamper ourselves once in a while), I gladly placed an order and sat down with my iPod touch. A short while later and I’m surfing via the free Wi-Fi provided.

I can gladly tell you that Apple made the iPod touch for more than just music. Steve Jobs know that people want mobile browsing, and the majority of handsets out there can’t compete much with the iPhone/iPod touch’s built-in mobile Safari.

I’d like to share a few gems that I stumbled-upon while mobile-browsing with Safari on my iPod touch.

First, double-tapping. Most of us are quite accustomed to zooming into a web page via pinching which was demonstrated by Steve Jobs on stage during the iPhone announcement. However, if you want to zoom into an area of a page really fast, try double-tapping. Most of the time, I’ll just double-tap an area of text and voila! Safari zooms into the said area. However, the real gem here is, Safari will try to ensure that the block of text in interest is viewable once zoomed-in. It prevents the need to scroll sideways, but if the text is too long, you will definitely still need to scroll up and down.

Next up is mobile Safari’s multiple pages browsing. The device allows for up to 8 different pages to be open at a time. Switching between pages is as simple as tapping the pages button and then flicking left or right. However, I sometimes accidentally choose a pages that I don’t want instead of flicking through it. Here’s the gem: tap on any of the blank space left and right of the currently highlighted page, and you flick, well left or right!

Finally, here’s a time saver tip. If you happen to be checking your GMail via Safari (you can also use the built-in Mail application), be sure to browse the mobile version instead of the classic desktop version of the GMail. The mobile version is made to be super-fast on the iPhone/iPod touch. Mobile Safari also supports a new standard called the HTML5 Client-Side Database Storage. This standard aims to help reduce the number queries to the server, which means lesser data to travel around and thus, a faster and more responsive experience. Currently, only Gmail mobile implements this, but more shall follow soon enough. Read more about this technology.

written by xcool \\ tags: iPhone, iPod touch, Safari, Tips, Tricks