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Is it possible to swipe between images in Swift iOS?

Will a "swipe to navigate" feature come to iOS 5 any time soon?

  • For example, if I go to "Settings" and select "Sounds", which is located in about the center of my screen, I have to move my thumb all the way back up to the top-left corner of the screen to navigate back to the main "Settings" menu.  It would be much nicer to "swipe to navigate" - i.e. to slide my thumb from the center of my screen, rightward, to navigate back to the previous page. Making the adjustment from a scroll pad in (e.g.) OS X 10.7, and pressing buttons to navigate native iOS apps - which, for all practical purposes, feel like webpages in Safari - is a definite step backwards in user experience.  Can't wait until this one is fixed!

  • Answer:

    There are two gestures that only use one finger: click and swipe. They are the most common and most intuitive gestures, and therefore the most valuable ones. They will probably never be changed without a major rethinking of the user interface. It is possible that Apple will use other gestures for this functionality. In that case they would probably just add it as an ''expert shortcut'' without replacing the current back button. Replacing the back button with a gesture would create the same usability nightmare (what will happen when you click it?) that Android has with their hardware back button. Apple are testing more and more gestures as expert shortcuts (home button, application switching, etc.), so this might be a future improvement. It's Apple, so who knows. But it isn't in any of the developer betas, AFAIK.

Samuel Lindblom at Quora Visit the source

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I realize this question is old, but I think recent events warrant an answer now. iOS 5 never offered this, and neither did iOS 6. But this is a major part of iOS 7, and it works beautifully in most cases. The worst part in my opinion is that some places in the OS still don't use it, which creates confusion since most of the rest of the OS now supports it.

Timothy McSwain

'Swipe to navigate' is somewhat established as a navigation flow already on the iPhone, only it moves between sibling views rather than up and down a hierarchy or back/forward through a chronology.  The weather app, for example, is navigated using swipe to view different cities (not to mention the home screen).  The discovery issue is addressed fairly well using the small page indicator dots at the bottom of the view. Extending this gesture (or a similar two fingered gesture) would need to account for existing user expectations in applications  using a combination of these flows.

Ben Packard

Your question reminds me of the iOS app, "Path."  If you swipe to the left, you get the global navigation, (assuming you're in your Path timeline) swiping to the right gives you the "Add Friends" interface.  Unfortunately, not all views in this app has this feature.  I personally like this IX a lot, I'm hoping this would catch on and become a standard.  :)

Kenn Lau

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