Jumping to a specific part of a long podcast (or other long audio/video file) can be a challenge on your iPhone. The controls work fine for a five minute song but lose accuracy when it’s an hourlong file.
This complainer explains: “For hour-plus podcasts, it’s absolutely ridiculous that you have a scrollbar that’s roughly half the vertical width of the iPhone. Every miniscule tick that the slider moves is 2-3 minutes! When you want to rewind 20 seconds or so, this is absolutely unacceptable.”
Turns out there’s a neat solution: Instead of going left/right, 1) touch the slider, 2) drag your finger down, and 3) then move it left or right. This lets you move the scroller with “fine point” precision and allows you to fast forward or rewind to just the right spot.
Brandstrup
on 05 May 11Thank you. I’ve been struggling with my dexterity.
Miles
on 05 May 11It’s even better:
The farther down you drag away from the timeline, the finer the controls get. And it displays the amount: Half-speed scrubbing, Quarter speed scrubbing, etc.
Doug
on 06 May 11Yes it’s possible but it’s not good and it’s not better.
It’s an awkward UI. It’s not easily discoverable.
There are times when I miss my fourth gen HP+iPod with a tactile wheel that I could manipulate without looking at it.
Ole Begemann
on 06 May 11Just in case anyone’s interested, I wrote a small open-source component that mirrors the iPod slider’s behavior so you can integrate it in your own iOS apps. The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/ole/OBSlider.
Tom Morris
on 07 May 11No, the answer is you buy an iPad. Duh. ;-)
This discussion is closed.