Swiping fingers only get you so far

Posted on Oct 27, 2008 in Design | 1 comment

I love my iPod Touch. It’s a slick, thin little beast that does amazing things, like allow me to listen to music and podcasts, play games, watch videos, and check my e-mail—including attachments. The first time I received a PDF attachment with my iPod Touch I was excited. Tap once, the loading icon spun and suddenly I’m viewing the PDF. Reverse pinch and I zoom in to read. Swipe down to scroll to the next page. Intuitive, simple, right. I read pages of my friend’s screenplay this way, giddy over both the story and how cool I was using this device to read it.

When next I returned to the screenplay, I barely noticed the time it took to swipe down half a dozen pages. And though the iPod remembers the position of the PDF between Mail sessions, if I returned to my inbox the PDF would be back at page one the next time I opened it: more swiping to get to where I was last time. Not a big deal for the first twenty… or thirty… or forty pages. It gets tedious after that.

“But this is Apple,” I thought as I felt my carpals tunneling as I madly swiped, trying to reach page 73 of the screenplay, “there must be a better way.” I spent minutes tapping, swiping, dragging, rotating, shaking, and performing all manner of manual manipulation in the hopes of seeing a “jump to page” dialog. No luck. What’s more frustrating? The inability to quickly get to a page in a long document or being let down by the company with the best usability in the industry?

Other people have noticed it, too. And I while I have no doubt that this was one of those items that Apple engineers knew about and wanted to address but was deemed less critical (like copy and paste), it’s still frustrating. It seems so simple: double-tap or perform another gesture and you can enter a page number.

Apple, please add a “jump to page” control for PDFs in the next iPhone/iPod Touch software update. I’ve got to finish reading my friend’s screenplay!

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