Stuttgart, Aug. 13:

Swipe to the left or right or up and down these are gestures that every smartphone owner knows. Other gestures for use on touchscreens or laptop touchpads tend to be known only to advanced users. Heres an overview: The one finger tip and swipe: The one finger movement is the mother of all gestures for touchscreens. With one finger an app is generally started, says Roland Stehle from Germanys Society for Entertainment and Communications Electronics (gfu). The one finger tip gesture is also used to scroll up and down on the screen or to move to the left or right.

The gesture is built on experiences from the real world and the movement therefore seems natural, says Katrin Wolf from the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS) at the University of Stuttgart.

Two finger drag: Its also intuitive to use two fingers for pushing something together or pulling it apart and thats the gesture most commonly used for zooming in and out. Its like kneading clay or dough, says Wolf. Dragging enlarges the dough and compressing it makes it more compact.

Rotation: Making a rotary motion with the finger on a screen or touchpad typically rotates the image or document. With some smartphones the device is rotated instead to achieve the same effect.

Multi-finger swipe: This gesture is available on some touchpads and tablets. From a motor perspective I can use several fingers for more coarse things, says Tom Gross, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Bamberg in Germany. The gesture is not used, for example, within an application but to switch between open applications. On a MacBook the four-finger swipe can be used to hide all windows and show the desktop.

User-defined gestures: Users can also define for themselves what a gesture will do, for example using a swipe on the numeric keyboard to unlock the screen. Gross believes the future will see a hybrid form of pre-defined and self-conceived gestures coming to the fore.

Shake: In addition to finger tip touches, swiping and rotating there are gestures that involve the entire hand. For example shaking to make a music player jump to the next track, says Stehle. On other devices its similar to a shake of the head, for example to reject a phone call.

Tilt: This gesture can have different effects. Sometimes it signals zooming in or out. In other cases it can mute the phone if the user puts the device down with the screen facing down, says Stehle.

(This article was published on August 13, 2014)

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Finger aerobics on the screen - touch gestures must be intuitive

Although I largely disagree with the author, I appreciate his willingness not to see science as the end of it all, to open the door for farther realities, and to tackle the difficulties involved. In the process, however, I find a too unquestioning commitment to the latest contentions of science. He correspondingly cites many recent thinkers, regrettably mainly philosophers, evidently because he is himself one.

He also speaks amply of historical figures and their deeds, although I was early in the book discouraged by careless inaccuracies. He writes (pp.12-13): "The Egyptians...knew that a 3, 4, 5 triangle is right-angled. It was Pythagoras or someone in his group who generalized it to all right-angled triangles (the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides)..." But the "it" only speaks a right-angled triangle, not mentioning squares. Worse, the author then describes Euclid's fifth postulate (he also oddly applies "postulate" to "common notion") as stating that "parallel lines never meet". This is the definition of parallel lines; the postulate states that certain lines meet.

Notwithstanding such weaknesses, the author takes us through numbers of progressions in scientific, philosophical and spiritual thought, the progressions in my view not always constituting progress. Here I will concentrate on alluded to recent views and arguments the author concurs with and I find decidedly faulty.

The author cites (pp.138-9) philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland as making "some very good points" about us being "hung up on folk psychology. We think that what we believe today must be the absolute bedrock of inquiry. Our sense of consciousness must be untouched. However, they argue that that is not the way things go in science".

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