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Chapter 1: The iPhone and iPod touch Development Platform

of the gestures that are used for browsing Web sites (such as the double - tap zoom) are actually not

something you want to support inside of an iPhone and iPod touch application. Table 1 - 2 displays the

gestures that are supported on iPhone and iPod touch as well as an indication as to whether this type

of gesture should be supported on a Web site or application. (However, as Chapter 5 explains in detail,

you will not have programmatic access to managing all of these inputs inside of Mobile Safari.)

Table 1-2: Finger Gestures

Gesture Result Web site App

Tap Equivalent to a mouse click Yes Yes

Drag Moves around the viewport Yes Yes

Flick Scrolls up and down a page or list Yes Yes

Double-tap Zooms in and centers a block of content Yes No

Pinch open Zooms in on content Yes No

Pinch close Zooms out to display more of a page Yes No

Touch and hold Displays an info bubble Yes No

Two-finger scroll Scrolls up and down an

iframe or element

with CSS

overflow:auto property

Yes Yes

Finally, several mouse actions have no finger touch equivalents on iPhone and iPod touch. These

include:

❑ No right - click

❑ No text selection

❑ No cut, copy, and paste

❑ No hover

❑ No drag - and - drop (though I offer a technique to roughly emulate it in Chapter 5 )

Limitations and Constraints

Since iPhone and iPod touch are mobile devices, they are obviously going to have resource constraints

that you need to be fully aware of as you develop applications. Table 1 - 3 lists the resource limitations

and technical constraints. What ’ s more, certain technologies (listed in Table 1 - 4 ) are unsupported, and

you will need to steer away from them when you develop for iPhone and iPod touch.

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