Like many people, at least that I know, I am having a better look to the iPhone SDK. Not only because I have an iPhone and an iPod-Touch, but also because I was curious to see which is the Apple way on building applications, especially on mobile devices. In the past I made some experiments with J2ME, PalmOS and Flash Lite; each one with its own pros and cons. I am still on early stages to give a deep opinion about the language Apple uses (Objective-C) and their framework. But so far I have to admit I have been positively impressed. Because NDA I don't think I can say much else about this.
By the way, iPhone brought to us, user interface designers, new potentialities and of course new issues. I am not suprised that features like multi-touch, which is in a very hype moment recently (thanks also to Microsoft Surface and Co.), are used in small and isolated cases. New paradigms need to be made but, especially considering the "natural" approach that Apple had when designing iPhone OS, it gets tricky to decide which will be best.
So in these days where people are trying to understand how those kind of interfaces should behave, I took the liberty to experiment with the scrolling of entire screens as a power user like me could find easier. I know that having two different ways of doing the same thing is not ideal, but first time I saw how to scroll between the previous and the next photo, for instance, I hoped it was a joke. I am still far from the truth but this doesn't mean of course that the current UI behaviors cannot improve using different approaches.
From the video that will follow, you will be able to notice three modalities which can co-exist:
Normal
It is basically how the iPhone does currently, to scroll from a screen to another, you just have to drag it for more of than the half of the screen, in few words the screen that will be seen the most after releasing will be the next one.
Continuous
Why on earth the dragging should have inertia? Without it, if I wanted to drag it a bit I could just drag it slower. After releasing I leave the eventual speed the user set until the screens end.
Power
When two fingers are on the screen, they work as scrollbar thumb. This is a bit a tricky one, especially when you have a long list of screens (50 is probably a discreet number), because can be hard to use. It is also true that some easing could be applied to give a more smoother control, but less reactive. With this method you can scroll from the first to the last one at the speed of light.
It is clear that having 50 screens available at "the speed of light" can bring, especially on mobile devices, ram problems because they should be loaded at the start, but this is just an experiment and these behaviors could be easily apply in less demanding contexts.
It has been fun to play with the multi-touch and see how Apple framework handles them and I am looking forward to see which will be the behaviors that will become standard, at the moment let's enjoy the experiments!