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Comment by alanctgardner2 | Hacker News Reader

I actually really like this idea: If you're in an email and you open a picture, you go to Gallery. Now you can a) Go 'Up' to the main Gallery activity, or b) 'Back' to your email. That seems pretty intuitive, a lot of the time I've been frustrated by the lack of an 'Up' option in apps.

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That is what kills me in iOS, I regularly get an email with a few urls to check. Heck even one is a pain: open email, see link, click link, browser opens, check link, press home button, swipe to screen with email client, press email, press email account was in before, scroll to email, press email, scroll to point I was at in email before I was dragged away.

In android it just a single back button away, or if something goes wrong, when I return to email I'll be where I was before, correctly scrolled in the email I was reading.

I miss android!

Not to say that iOS isn't a pain for rapidly moving between tasks, but if you double tap the home button Email will still be in there so you should be able to swap back quicker.

Excellent, I've never heard of that as a solution from my iOS using friends, so I'll do that now. They were just as stumped as me!

I had to sit and explain the process to both my girlfriend and my Dad recently, I think one of the issues is it's a "you have to know it to know about it" situation, it's mentioned plenty by Apple but given that the products are pretty user manual free there's many things that you have to know it to know it.

Hope it helps, you can show your friends and bathe in the satisfaction of knowledge sharing. Also on iPad, 4 finger swipe to move between apps, 4 fingers up to show App Tray, full page pinch for home. Not hidden by any stretch, but not widely known.

Yeah, these interaction features make the OS much more usable for sure, but their obscurity isn't doing Apple any favors.

4 finger swipe should bring you back to Mail.

I can't get that to work on my ipod touch or iphone 3gs - (and it's pretty tricky to do on the screen) - should it work?

Nope, the four-finger swipe gesture only works on iPad 2 and iPad 3.

And iPad 1.

I believe it's iPad only.

Except it doesn't really work that way. I'm texting in WhatsApp when I get an email. I open the email from the notification area, read it, hit back, it exits to the home screen and not WhatsApp.

When I already have a home button, why should the back button be used more for home (besides the actions in the app) rather than "up" a level to a previous state like it's supposed to?

It is a good idea -- it's confusing if you're switching from old android devices, but only until you change your mental model.

Someone starting out with jellybean as their first touch OS would have few problems... at least if apps actually followed the guidelines. >_>

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