Читать книгу iPad For Dummies - LeVitus Bob - Страница 13

The iPad, like the iPhone, dispenses with a physical mouse and keyboard, in favor of a virtual keyboard – a step that seemed revolutionary just a few years ago. Nowadays, a virtual keyboard doesn’t seem as novel.

Neither does the fact that the designers of the iPad (and iPhone and iPod touch) removed the usual physical buttons in favor of a multitouch display. This beautiful and responsive finger-controlled screen is at the heart of the many things you do on the iPad.

In the following sections, you discover how to move around the multitouch interface with ease. Later, we home in on how to make the most of the keyboard.

Training your digits

Rice Krispies have Snap! Crackle! Pop! Apple’s response for the iPad is Tap! Flick! Pinch! Oh yeah, and Drag!

Fortunately, tapping, flicking, pinching, and dragging are not challenging gestures, so you can master many of the iPad’s features in no time:

✓ Tap: Tapping serves multiple purposes. Tap an icon to open an app from the Home screen. Tap to start playing a song or to choose the photo album you want to look through. Sometimes, you double-tap (tapping twice in rapid succession), which has the effect of zooming in (or out) of web pages, maps, and emails.

✓ Flick: Flicking is just what it sounds like. A flick of the finger on the screen lets you quickly scroll through lists of songs, emails, and picture thumbnails. Tap the screen to stop scrolling, or merely wait for the scrolling list to stop.

✓ Pinch/spread: Place two fingers on a web page, map, or picture, and then spread your fingers apart to enlarge the images. Or pinch your fingers together to make the map or picture smaller. Pinching and spreading (or what we call unpinching) are cool gestures that are easy to master and sure to wow an audience.

✓ Drag: Here’s where you slowly press your finger against the touchscreen without lifting it. You might drag to move around a web page or map that’s too large for the iPad’s display area.

✓ Drag downward from the top of the screen: This special gesture displays Notification Center (which you find out about in Chapter 13). Press your finger at the very top of the screen and drag downward.

✓ Drag downward from any screen without starting at the very top of the screen: This action summons Spotlight search, a discussion for later in this chapter.

✓ Drag from left to right from the first Home screen: You are summoning the Today screen, which was once part of Notification Center but as of the iOS 10 upgrade was split off and elevated to solo status. You’ll see the appointments and reminders you have coming up, get app suggestions, and be able to access Spotlight search at the top of the Today screen. This today view is available on the lock screen or via one of the Home screens.

✓ Drag from right to left from the lock screen: This shortcut action summons the iPad’s camera app.

✓ Drag upward from the bottom of the screen: This time, you’re calling up Control Center, a handy repository for music controls, airplane mode (see Chapter 15), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, do not disturb, mute, volume, orientation lock, timer (Clock app), camera, AirPlay, and brightness controls. Check out Figure 2-1 for one view of Control Center.

✓ Swipe from right edge of the screen: You can pull in a temporary overlay of another open app, a slide over feature we get to later in this chapter. This action requires that you go to Settings ⇒ General and enable the Allow Multiple Apps switch.

✓ Four- or five-finger swipes and pinches: To quickly multitask or switch among or view running apps (see the later section, “Multitasking”), use four or five fingers to swipe upward. Swipe left or right (only one finger required) to switch between recently used apps. Pinch using four or five fingers to jump to your Home screen. Swipe up (one finger will do the trick) on an app’s thumbnail to quit it. The four- or five-finger swipes and pinches require you to enable Multitasking Gestures in the Settings app’s General pane.

FIGURE 2-1: We think you’ll call on Control Center a lot.

Later in this chapter, you read about a couple of new ways to employ your digits, at least on certain models: slide over and split view.

Navigating beyond the Home screen

The Home screen, which we discuss in Chapter 1, is not the only screen of icons on your tablet. After you start adding apps from the iTunes App Store (which you discover in Chapter 11), you may see a row of two or more tiny dots just above the main apps parked at the bottom of the screen. Those dots denote additional Home screens each containing up to 20 additional icons, not counting the 4 to 6 separate icons docked at the bottom of each of these Home screens. You can have up to 15 Home screens. You can also have fewer docked icons at the bottom of the Home screen, but we can’t think of a decent reason why you’d want to ditch any of them. In any case, more on these in a moment.

Here’s what you need to know about navigating among the screens:

✓ To navigate between screens, flick your finger from right to left or left to right across the middle of the screen, or tap directly on the dots. The number of dots you see represents the current number of screens on your iPad. The all-white dot denotes the screen that you’re currently viewing. Flicking from right to left from the first Home screen brings up the aforementioned Today screen.

You can also drag your finger in either horizontal direction to see a different screen. Unlike flicking – you may prefer the term swiping – dragging your finger means keeping it pressed against the screen until you reach your desired page.

✓ Make sure you swipe and not just tap, or you’ll probably open one of the app icons instead of switching screens.

✓ Press the Home button to jump back to the Home screen. Doing so the first time takes you back to whatever Home screen you were on last. Tapping Home a second time takes you to the first Home screen.

✓ The dock – which contains the Messages, Safari, Mail, and Music icons in the bottom row – stays put as you switch screens. In other words, only the first 20 icons on the screen change when you move from one screen to another.

You can add one or two more icons to the dock. Or move one of the four default icons into the main area of the Home screen to make space for additional app icons you may use more often, as described later in this chapter.

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