Tip O' The Week: Fingertip Tricks for Scrolling

Once I finally trained myself to no longer reflexively reach for a stylus on my iPhone, it truly hit me that the world was at my fingertips (warning: pun alert). Flipping through photo albums with the flick of my finger just doesn't get old. Pinching text and photos to fit on the screen or expanding the same with my thumb and index finger was intuitive from the time my iPhone came out of the box.

I like the little things, like tapping the very top of the screen to return to the top of a web page after scrolling down for miles. Conversely, it would be nice to have a similar mechanism for instantly jumping to the bottom, eh?

Read on for more Tapping, Scrolling,

Double-tapping is a great way to instantly expand the image size in Mobile Safari. It's easier on the eyes to read some of the smaller text or images. Then, just a quick double-tap again and everything shrinks back to the original size. Simple and easy, right at (er, under) your fingertips.

If you haven't guessed by now, this week's Tip is all about the fingertips. Some web sites contain lists of information that are seemingly difficult to access when surfing on your iPhone. If it's a scrollable list, you may have noticed that when you use your fingertip, you end up scrolling the entire page instead of the area within the page that you wish to scroll instead. Fortunately, there IS an answer. It's far from the answer to the ultimate question (42, right? ahem.), but it's the answer for scrolling lists within a web site.

With TWO (2) fingers, held closely together, you now have the power to scroll a list within a site. In this manner, you should be able to scroll a list within a site without scrolling down in the site itself. Who knew your fingertips held such power?

Now, for an added bonus this week. When I'm scrolling down in a site that is poorly formatted for my iPhone (or any mobile device), sometimes I mistakenly drift to the side and experience side-scrolling, which can be annoying. A simple fix to this is scroll with your fingertip on the far right edge of your screen (photo courtesy of artilleryunit.com/blog). You are pretty much guaranteed an elimination of side-scrolling if you use this method. Give it a try!

Thanks for stopping by again this week for the Tip o' the Week, a week that is truly a Tip about tips!

Disclaimer: Tip o' the Week makes no guarantee, express or implied, that any tip found herein will be new or particularly useful to the reader (and in the spirit of being punny, don't forget to tip your writer... er, waiter).