Feature of the Week

Gestures

| Feature of the Week

Poking at a screen may have once seemed unnatural, but today we spend a huge amount of time tapping, sliding, and pinching at slabs of glass. It’s a natural input method, and what it lacks in precision it makes up for with things like gestures. Gestures allow your device to interpret unique motions, and they work best when they’re location-independent; swiping anywhere on the screen or tapping within large regions to turn pages is much easier than trying to move a slider or tap a button.

Of course, the problem with gestures is that you can’t see them and you don’t always know they exist. There’s one particular gesture that’s so important and frequently used that it’s scary to hear from the occasional customer who still doesn’t know about it: the long press or tap-and-hold gesture that activates annotation mode by default. (Friends don’t let friends use the tools menu to annotate.)

In fact, forScore has three gestures beyond the standard swipes and taps used to turn pages. The long press, a 2-finger tap, and a 3-finger tap. The latter two don’t do anything by default, but all three of them can be customized in the “Gestures” section of the settings panel.