Controls & Using The Touchscreen
While your NU2S smartphone certainly has a number of buttons you can push, you will
control it primarily by using the touchscreen. You may wonder just how many different
ways one can touch a screen, and as it turns out there are a few of them! You’ll find a
handy list of the most common ones below, which includes the name for the gesture and
a description how to perform it.
Important!:
Your phone’s touchscreen is NOT pressure-sensitive, as it instead works
by sensing tiny electrical currents. This means that when you touch the
screen, you only need to make contact, you do not need to apply
pressure. If your fingertips are heavily callused (or if you are wearing
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non-conductive gloves), the screen may not “hear” you or register your
touches properly. In that case, try a different fingertip or a patch of bare skin.
“Tap”: In some documentation, this may also be referred to as a “touch” or even a
“click”. It’s almost exactly like tapping your finger on a table; aim a single fingertip, touch
it to the screen, and pull it away from the screen. You can have your finger in contact with
the screen for quite a bit before the phone registers it as a “long-press”, so don’t feel like
you have to pull away instantly.
“Double-tap”: Two taps in rapid succession, almost exactly like double-clicking a
mouse, but with your fingertip. Rarely called a “double-click”. Used for different things in
different apps, so make sure to consult the help for that app!
“Long-press”: Sometimes referred to as “hold” or “tap-and-hold” or “touch-and-hold”.
Place your finger on the screen and keep it there. After about a full second, the phone
will recognize this as a long-press and give you some kind of feedback: a menu might
appear, an icon might start shaking, or some element of the interface will change to
indicate that you have the phone’s complete attention.
What makes the long-press a little difficult is that in some apps, removing your finger from
the screen makes your next selection, and in other apps, you’re expected to make a
separate “tap” to select the thing you want after a long-press. This behavior isn’t
constant across all apps so you’ll need to experiment a little with your apps.
“Drag-and-drop”: Sometimes mentioned as “drag-n-drop”, “drag”, or “touch, hold,
and drag”. First you long-press something, then once you’ve gotten the visual feedback that shows that the phone interpreted your long-press, you keep your finger on the
screen as you move it around. When you remove your finger from the screen, you “drop”
the item in question.
The usual example is moving your app icons around. First you long-press the icon in
question until you see it get “picked up” or highlighted somehow, then (keeping your
finger on the screen) you “drag” the icon to its new spot. When you let go, you’ve
“dropped” it. The key part is that a drag-and-drop always starts with a long-press.
“Slide”: Closely related to the drag-and-drop. While a drag-and-drop requires a
long-press at the beginning, a slide does not. Unlocking the phone, answering a call, and
bringing up Google Now all require slide motions, where you slide an on-screen button in
a straight line, with no pause or delay after touching the button.
“Swipe”: A swipe is a gesture that’s just like moving a playing card across a smooth felt
table. There’s no pause at either end, just a smooth motion. The tricky part of swiping is
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what is meant by the term “swipe left” or “swipe right”.
In NUU documentation (and Google’s) the direction refers to the way your fingertip goes.
So “swipe left” means your fingertip starts on the right side of the screen and goes to
the left. That swiping left often looks like the whole app “jumped” to the right is where the
potential confusion comes from. When in doubt, follow your fingertip!
Swiping is normally used to bring a menu onto the screen, switch between windows, or
other large-scale actions that involve most or all of the screen instead of just a single part,
like the slide.
“Two-finger swipe”: Just like a regular swipe, but with two fingertips instead of just
one. Sometimes you’ll even see apps that ask for a three-finger swipe, but this is pretty
rare.
“Pinch”: Sometimes simply referred to as “zoom” and the two terms are often combined into “pinch-to-zoom”. Google sometimes calls it “scale”. This refers to placing two
fingertips on the screen and either pinching them together or spreading them apart to
change the size of something, usually a picture or a web page. Note that you can often
rotate an image with this gesture as well as zoom.
Those Three Buttons
At the bottom of the screen you’ll find three buttons (consult the NU2S Overview
diagram for their location).
Here’s what they do.
Recent: Tapping this button brings up the “Recent” menu. This is a vertical list of apps
that are currently active. If you have Chrome’s “merge tabs” feature turned on, Recent
also lets you switch between Chrome tabs. You can slide the list up and down to see the
whole list. Slide an app’s picture off the screen (left or right works) to make it inactive.
You can also tap the app’s X button to do the same thing. This is often referred to as
“killing” or “force-quitting” an app, and it’s a useful thing to know as doing so can solve
many problems with a misbehaving app!
Home: The Home button has two main functions. Tapping the Home button will always
take you back to your Home screen, the “center” screen in the pages of icons you can
have on your phone. If you’re lost, tap Home and you’ll be taken back to familiar territory!
Recent Home Back
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Common Onscreen Buttons
Drawer: This button is used to access a general menu in a particular app. In
Google Maps, for example, it lets you switch between map and satellite view,
among other things. In GMail, the Drawer allows you to switch between folders.
If your app has a Drawer button, you should familiarize yourself with the options it
presents. Sometimes the Drawer is also referred to as “options” or “hamburger”
or, confusingly, “menu”.
Share: Pressing Share allows you to send the content of your current app to
someone else. For example, when looking at the details for an app in the Play
Store, using the Share button allows you to send a link to that app by e-mail,
Bluetooth, MMS, or in a variety of other ways. The same thing can be done in the
Contacts app and other places. Sometimes this button is referred to as “Send” or
“Send Using...”.
Overflow: The official name is both “Menu” and “Overflow”, but NUU
documentation uses “Overflow” to avoid confusion. Sometimes also known as
“options” or “the stoplight”. Whatever its name, this button brings up options
relevant to the current screen. If you were looking at a Contact card, for example,
“Overflow” would allow you to edit, delete, share, or set the ringtone for that
contact only. “Overflow” provides access to your bookmarks and other settings in
the Google Chrome app.
Long-pressing the Home button brings up the Search app, which lets you search the
contents of your phone and the web at the same time.
Back: This does exactly what its name suggests; it takes you back one step. If you
called up a sub-menu, for example, and wanted to go back to the previous menu, just
tap the Back button one time to do that. If you tap Back enough times, you will
eventually work all the way to your Home screen, so this is another way of getting back
to familiar territory if you’re lost.
