Open up your laptop, MacBook or whatever else you’re using (On a MacBook here so I’ll stick with OSX terminology going forward). Start Finder, Hold cmd and click on a file. Click on another. And another.
Click, click, click.
We’ve selected a few files by individually clicking on them, but most of us know that we could just as easily click once and drag our cursor across the files we want to select. When we’re selecting a group of files, It’s so much more convenient!
Let’s try that on mobile (iPhone here). Open up the Photos app and choose Camera Roll/Recently Added, if it’s not already open. Tap ‘Select’ in the top right and tap on a photo. Tap on another. And another. Tap, tap, tap.
Just as we did with the files, we’ve selected a few photos, but this time, there’s no quicker or convenient way to do it! We’re forced to tap on every single photo we want to select.
We came across this problem whilst building multi-photo upload for Mosayc and we thought to ourselves how do we solve it?
Well, it turns out we already have! On our computers we click and drag. What if we take that and do it on mobile? The only difference is that we don’t click on mobile, we tap. We don’t drag a cursor on mobile, we slide our finger across the screen. So we’ve taken click and drag and turned it into tap and slide. It’s a brand new interaction we’re bringing to Mosayc, and we’re calling it Slide-to-Select. Here’s what it looks like:
Doesn’t that look so much simpler? Slide your finger across the screen and you’ll select photos as you go along. It’s really quick and it’s really simple (and fun to play around with too).
