Mobile Safari is already decent in its current state, but like everything in iOS, there is always room for intuitive improvement. To the mind of iOS developer deVbug, Mobile Safari had a lot of room for improvement. With his newest release, a jailbreak tweak dubbed Swipe Safari, you can now make Mobile Safari much more intuitive by adding support for multi-touch gestures and full-screen browsing.
Installing Swipe Safari adds a preferences pane to the Settings application where you will be able to assign all of your multi-touch gestures to whatever you want them to be. There are all kinds of different invocation methods for using different finger and gesture combinations. The different invocation methods are mapped out below:
The different finger gestures are as follows:
- One finger swipe
- Right
- Left
- Two finger swipe
- Right
- Left
- Down
- Up
- Three finger swipe
- Right
- Left
- Down
- Up
- Two finger pinch
- One finger tap
- Double tap
- Triple tab
- Two finger tap
- Double tap
- One finger long press
- Single tap and long press
- Double tap and long press
- Cancel delay options
Additionally, each and every one of these gestures can be set to do any of the following:
- Nothing
- Go back a page
- Go forward a page
- Go to the top of the page
- Go to the bottom of the page
- Go to the previous tab
- Go to the next tab
- Refresh the page
- Show all open tabs
- Open a new tab
- Close current tab
- Toggle full-screen
- Show bookmarks
- Show closed tabs
With the large selection of gestures as well as the large selection of actions, it’s possible to make Mobile Safari more like the full-featured multi-touch Safari Web browser in Mac OS X Lion. However, there are more gestures than there are actions, so it’s obvious that either the user won’t use some of the gestures, or at least one gesture will carry the same action as a different gesture. The tweak offers not only multi-touch gesture functionality, but also the ability to use a puller:
The puller is a feature of Swipe Safari that allows you to bring up options separate from the multi-touch gestures. These options only appear when you swipe with one finger away from any of the four sides of the screen. For example, pulling down will refresh the page, pulling up will open up your bookmarks menu, pulling right will display your left tab, and pulling left will display your right tab. The puller can be enabled or disabled at any time if you prefer using the multi-touch gestures instead.
From the main window the preferences pane, you will find two other important options. The first is the ability to hide the status bar when you are in full-screen browsing mode (some people like to see the status bar so they can keep watch of the time and their battery) and there is also a button every new user needs to go into to register the tweak after installing.
Swipe Safari is a nice tweak for anyone that uses Mobile Safari very often in their daily lives. The tweak is very similar to Yllier’s FullScreen for Safari tweak, however the difference has to do with some differing options and the price. FullScreen for Safari will cost you $2.19, however this week only, Swipe Safari will cost $1.50 and soon become $3. Another major difference is that Swipe Safari is universal, supporting the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. FullScreen for Safari requires that you buy a separate version for the iPad.
Swipe Safari doesn’t cause any slowing down of the Safari application, so if you’re worried about performance, you can be assured that browsing will still remain as fluid as the day you first pulled your iOS device out of Apple’s packaging. The multi-touch gestures are fun to use because it takes advantage of using your fingers to control the Internet. It is much more fun than tapping buttons because buttons symbolize something other than a touch screen. If you think multi-touch gestures could be a useful asset to your mobile Web browsing, then be sure to give Swipe Safari a try.
Name: Swipe Safari
Price: $3 ($1.50 for this week only)
Version: 1.0-6
Requirements: iOS 5
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: deVbug
Editor's Rating: 4/5
Sources: deVbug
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