Tap versus Swipe

It may sound like the latest cartoon/video game produced by some Japanese tech company but it involves a much more mundane reality than that. iPhone owners will immediately sympathize with this most basic of iphoning dilemmas – do you prefer the tap or do you prefer the swipe?

Given the chance would you do away with the possibility of answering calls by having to swipe the bottom of the screen? Do you, like me, have an aversion to certain commands prompted by swiping on the iphone? Have you remained guiltily silent about the olympic difficult of performing a simple scroll on certain websites even when they have a mobile version?

I was reorganizing my app icons on the iphone last night when I stumbled upon a wonderful discovery. It was not as life changing as, say, the invention of sliced bread or the reorganization of KSU but in its own way it will have its positive effects on my standard of living. iPhone users will be familiar with the possibility of giving your iphone apps what seems to be like a collective epileptic fit by keeping your finger depressed on one of them long enough. Normally what happens next is that while the apps shake vigorously onscreen you are allowed to slide them around the different “pages”/”screens” of the iphone.

Well I was doing just that last night when I inadvertently and very serendipitously slid one app icon over another. What happened next caused my jaw to drop for a full five seconds before eventually getting over it with a shrug of the shoulder and a conclusion that such a development was inevitable. The app icons merged into one icon that – for want of a better word – we shall call a folder app. It collected the two previous apps in one and asked me to prompt it with a name for this Happy App Collective. Which I did. I called them news – because that is what the apps are about.

I then went about aggregating other apps together in the same manner and reduced the number of iphone screens to just two. That’s from an original five you know. That, my friends, is a victory for the tap over the swipe. For to access a different screen you need to swipe. To access a folder and then its various constituent apps all you do is tap happily away. And boy am I a happy tapper.

The main disadvantage with swipes is that they fail to take into consideration the grippy hand and the sticky screen. The iphone tends to gaze back at you fuzzily while it wonders whether you really meant the swipe or whether it was yet another endearing mini-hug being applied to the device that (to plagiarize Carlsberg) is probably the best handheld device in the world. iphone fails to note that our honeymoon period is over and that I am still fuming at its transformation into a senile degenerate ever since its new cousin (iphone 4) and the new OS (4.1) has entered the landscape.

At least taps are beating swipes. For now.

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