When you are watching a video that you have either loaded on to your device or streamed from the web (as opposed to a video taken with the camcorder), have you ever noticed that your video may be zoomed in so part of the top or sides get chopped off? Or maybe you are watching a video and you see black bars on the top or sides of the video? You can actually swap between these zoomed in and out modes in your video by first tapping on the screen to bring up the video controls (if not already shown), and then tapping the  icon to zoom in (to get rid of the black bars on around the video) or the  icon to zoom out (to see the full video).

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Many websites (including the full PreCentral.net website) are not built with a mobile browser in mind, often using dropdown menus that are only accessible by rolling your mouse cursor over a certain area of the screen. Since the mobile web browser doesn’t have a mouse, you need another way to access these menus. Luckily, the browser does allow for a press-and-hold method to bring down these menus. Unfortunately, when you lift your finger from the screen after the dropdown menu appears, the browser then registers that as a tap and loads up any link that was tied to that dropdown menu (for example, the "articles" link in the attached screenshot). There are 2 simple ways to combat this behavior:

1. Instead of a press-and-hold, double-tap on the screen to access the menu. This may result in an odd zoom-in due to the double tap, but just pinch-to-zoom out and you will be able to access the drop-down menu as needed
2. Still use the press-and-hold method to bring down the menu, but then just drag your finger slightly in any direction across the screen. This movement will tell the browser not to load up the link from the initial tap, allowing you to then select whatever option you need from the dropdown menu.

Thanks to emusician in the forums for this tip

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Pinch-to-zoom is a good way to zoom in and out throughout webOS, but you can also perform a double-tap to quickly zoom in on large blocks of text within an email, website or document. Simply double-tap on the text you want to read and you will find that the device automatically zooms in so that text fits the screen width. If you want to quickly zoom out, just double-tap again. You can also double-tap on a Photo to zoom in to a specific spot.

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• Note that you should wait for the email, website or photo to completely load, or else the zoom level may reset once it finishes loading.
• Unlike Android, webOS doesn’t ‘reflow” the text to fit the screen width (which we prefer anyway). If text is still too small when you zoom in, try turning your phone sideways for landscape mode.

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Everyone know that webOS 1.4 brought with it many welcomed features and additions.  Unfortunately it also brought with it a few bugs.

When 1.4 arrived, several people took notice that both the PDF View app and the Doc View app now suddenly were missing multi-touch.  Given the recent legal new with App and HTC, some worried it may have been removed intentionally.

Thankfully, Palm Tech Support employee and PreCentral forum member HardBeatZ, popped in to tell us Palm has this tracked as a bug in their system. Furthermore, a few days later, Palm’s own Ben Combee posted in the official Palm forums, saying

I checked on this. The lack of pinch zoom is a bug with some common code in PDF and doc viewer that wasn’t updated for 1.4, and it looks like it’s been fixed for a future release.

Not only was that an unintentional bug, but it sounds as though it’s already been fixed and will be in a future update (presumably webOS 1.4.1). Big ups to Palm for allowing their people to be out there in the community, letting us know we’re not crazy and that fixes are coming.

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