It’s a fairly well-known fact by now that those with Apple Developer accounts have access to a set of extra four- and five-finger gestures to help with multitasking on the iPad. I just want to make an effort to make it equally well known how much these gestures rock in the hopes that they eventually make it to a public release.
First of all, here are the basics: Four fingers up triggers the multitasking bar, four-finger lateral swipes will switch instantly between apps, and a four-finger pinch will return to the home screen from an app. Five-finger gestures work in exactly the same manner, except they require your pinky to join the party.
I can see why Apple didn’t want to introduce these extra multitasking gestures without some sort of video tutorial or official introduction at a keynote: they seem to be a new concept on iOS. Well, sort of. Multitouch gestures have been native to the OS from the start, but only in the two- and three-finger variety, and none of them — aside from the Accessibility features that most users don’t need — work across the OS.
Most iOS users are trained to think of touch as a method to interact with what is currently on-screen and to think of the Home button as the only way to get from one screen to another. Given this precedent, I can see how users could scratch their heads and wonder why playing the piano with four fingers in Garageband is causing the multitasking bar to pop up. But it’s not as though the majority of apps require four or five fingers, or even require those fingers to move in a way that would activate any of these gestures. In fact, most of the apps that I use require just one finger and only use two finger gestures when required.
On another note, it’s not as though the idea of global multitouch gestures is unprecedented in Apple computing.
Apple likes referencing its very own systems for teaching concepts (e.g. the Mac App Store is like the iOS App Store but for your computer), so let me point to the global multitouch usage in MacBook and Magic trackpads. There are four finger swipes to see the desktop (home screen), trigger Exposé (multitasking bar), and lateral gestures to move directly between recently used apps. The multitasking gestures of the iPad are obviously based upon those of the trackpad, and for iPad users who also own Macs, I think that helps make them more recognizable. The gestures haven’t just come out of the blue either: they were introduced in the beta of 4.3, which came months after the initial iPad multitasking update of late 2010. There has been some build up.
I’ve read somewhere (not meant to be vague — I just lost that link) that these gestures tend to take away one of the best parts about the iPad — its singular focus on the content that is currently on-screen. I do believe that that focus is one of the iPad’s best aspects, but I don’t think these gestures interrupt it in any way.
First of all, as stated earlier, four and five finger gestures tend to go unused in most apps, so unless people accidentally drop some salt on the iPad screen and try to pinch it off, most users should be fine.
Secondly, the gestures seem no more intrusive than the presence of a hardware Home button at the bottom of the iPad. The Home button isn’t hidden while you read in iBooks — it’s always there, always ready to be used. I’ve actually hit the Home button by accident while reading within iBooks more often than I have accidentally switched apps via gestures.
However, should it come to pass that the multitasking gestures simply feel too haphazard and are app hazards, the fact of the matter is that the gestures currently require manual activation to work at all, and much like the Accessibility features, I think they should stay that way. I just hope that Apple decides to release them to the public sooner rather than later so that I don’t have to keep downloading Xcode every time there’s a major firmware update. 🙂
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