4.2. Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages

These two gestures—zooming in on web pages and then scrolling around them—have probably sold more people on Apple’s multitouch operating system for the iPod-iPhone-iPad than any other feature. It all happens with fluid animation and a responsiveness to your finger taps that’s positively addicting. New owners often spend time just zooming in and out of web pages simply because they can.

When you first open a web page, you get to see the entire thing. After the iPhone and iPod Touch, this isn’t particularly new. But unlike your experience on the smaller devices, when you open a web page on the iPad, you can actually read the entire thing. Really!

But say you want to zoom in on a picture or take a closer look at something. The next step is to magnify that part of the page.

The iPad offers three ways to do that:

• Rotate an iPad in Portrait Mode. Turn the device 90 degrees in either direction. The iPad rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

• Do the two-finger spread. Put two fingers together on the glass and then spread them apart. The web page stretches before your very eyes, growing larger. Then pinch to shrink the page back down again. (Most people do several spreads or several pinches in a row to achieve the degree of zoom they want.)

  
  

  

  
  

• Double-tap. Safari is intelligent enough to recognize different chunks of a web page. One article might represent a chunk, for example, and a photograph another chunk. When you double-tap a chunk, Safari magnifies just that chunk front and center on the screen. It’s smart and useful—and great for iPad readers who need a lot of magnification.

  Double-tap again to zoom back out.

Once you zoom out to the proper degree, you can scroll around the page by dragging or flicking with your finger. You don’t have to worry about clicking a link by accident; if your finger’s in motion, Safari ignores the tapping action, even if you happen to land on a link.

To go ahead and actually click a link, simply tap it with your finger.

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Tip:

Every so often, you’ll find, on certain web pages, a frame (a column of text) with its own scroll bar—an area of content that scrolls independently of the main page. (If you have a MobileMe account, the Messages list is such a frame.) The iPad offers its own way to scroll one of these frames without scrolling the whole page: it’s the two-finger drag. To scroll within a frame, use two fingers instead of the usual one.

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