I’ve been playing with Apple’s iWork for the iPad recently to understand how Apple solves the user interface issues presented by a touch device. There are a couple of basic differences with what Intaglio Sketchpad does and I’m curious to learn if anyone here has any opinions.
In most iPod/iPad/iPhone apps (Safari, etc.) you tap your finger to select something, drag your finger to scroll and pinch two fingers to zoom. Sketchpad uses one finger to draw or select the graphics in a rectangle (much as Intaglio on the desktop does with the mouse) and two fingers dragged to scroll, pinched to zoom (or scale) and twisted to rotate. When an object is selected Sketchpad shows a blue halo around the object. It doesn’t show the traditional drag “handle” boxes to scale, but expects you to pinch in various directions to scale. This differs from the desktop Intaglio, which shows the blue squares around the selection. This means a Sketchpad user can’t zoom while something is selected because pinching scales the selection, overriding the zoom behavior.
iWork on iPad uses the traditional selection handles and pinching always zooms. iWork also tries to support the standard of one finger scrolling, but if something is selected you use one finger to drag that object so in that case you can’t scroll. To drag an object requires you to first select it by tapping it, then drag it as two separate actions. Of course iWork doesn’t ever require a drag to draw something like a line or rectangle so it doesn’t have that issue to contend with.
So basically, when something is selected in iWork you can’t scroll and when something is selected in Sketchpad you can’t zoom. Sketchpad is non-standard from most apps in that it requires two fingers to scroll. I’m thinking about dumping the selection halo and pinch to scale method and going back to the more traditional selection handles that you drag to scale. It’s an interesting experiment but doesn’t seem to be the way other software is going. However I don’t see a way to make one finger scroll work well with most drawing functions so I’d probably leave the two finger scroll as it is. Anybody have any thoughts or ideas?
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