Tired of all that boring ol’ two finger pinching-and-zooming and swiping on the iPhone? Ready for some fancy new gestures to be thrown into the mix? Wish granted. Soon. Maybe.
Last night, Apple released a new beta of iPhone OS 3.2 to developers. As is par for the course at this point, people almost instantly began tearing through the OS looking for secrets hidden within – and it looks like they just found one.
Tucked deep within the file system is a set of gesture recognizers, defining which fancy finger tricks that iPhone OS can recognize. In this latest build, it seems that two new gestures have made the list: “3tap” and “LongPress”. While no one has nailed out any way to make use of either just yet, we’re pretty sure we can deduce what they are from the names: three finger tapping, and long-hold presses.
Neither of these are really brand new; long-hold presses are already used by Apple to rearrange apps on the homescreen, and developers could have been detecting three-finger taps manually from the beginning. Their presence as official gestures, however, indicates that Apple might be looking to make them more easily accessible to developers and more widely used throughout the OS.
I’m having a hard time thinking of ways that a three-finger press could be used in an intuitive way where alternatives wouldn’t work just as well. Any ideas? Let us know in the comments below.
Update: As Mike points out in the comments, “3tap” could also mean 3 taps in quick succession. For example, 2 quick taps on a map could be zoom, while 3 quick taps could be super zoom. What say you?
[Via 9to5mac]