Saturday, September 17, 2011

Multitasking Gestures on the iPad with iOS 5 & how to enable them now.


Update: This feature will only work on the iPad 2 with iOS 5. If any one has an iPad 1 and tries the method below and it works after updated to iOS 5 I would love to know.

Many of you may have already done this but I just wanted to let you know about any way. In the upcoming iOS there are going to be more that 200 new features added to the iPad and iPhone. One of these features is the ability to use all of you fingers to do certain gestures on the iPad.

There are three main gestures that you are able to do. If you are in any app all you need to is place all 5 of your fingers on the screen and swipe in towards the middle. This will take you right back to the main screen without having to hit the home button.

The next gesture is when you are using an app you can put 4 fingers on the screen and swipe left or right to quickly jump back and forth between the different apps that you have open. I find this to be very useful and make for quick and simple multitasking.

The last gesture is from any screen you place for fingers on the screen and then you can swipe them up and it will bring up the multi tasking bar instead of hitting the home button twice.

If you would like to use these gestures now check out the video below to see how to enable it. You will need to have a Mac, and download Xcode for free from the Mac app store. Open Xcode and plug in your iPad and then press the use for development button. It then asks you to sign in to your Apple Developer account but I just hit cancel and it worked. Then go to settings on the iPad and make sure multitouch gestures are on and that is it.

In the video he talks about 2 different versions of Xcode but now it is free from the Mac App Store so it makes it really easy. Have you enabled these? What do you think? Enjoy.