It’s always cool discovering handy new features in apps that you use frequently. River of News is my favorite RSS reader for the iPad, and an app I use every day. So I was very happy to see a blog post from its developer today, that alerted me to some custom gestures settings for the app. Here’s the reasoning behind these options:

iOS has introduced a gesture language that we take for granted now with scrolling, swiping, and pinching. It’s safe to assume that users know those and for apps to apply them in standard ways. But how should gestures be used beyond that?

I like mobile apps that use gestures in a way similar to keyboard shortcuts on a desktop OS. The intent is to provide a fast way to execute common actions with the key being they are useful, but not required. River of News 1.3 added the gesture choices you see above. The gestures can perform navigation actions like jump to the next article or provide a way to invoke your most commonly used sharing service.

I had no idea these settings were there before seeing the blog post. I’ve given them a quick look and tryout today and I’m already finding them super useful, especially the two finger tap gesture.  I also like the extensive range of actions that are possible to set for each of these gestures within the app.

Very cool bit of thinking, and execution, on this. A favorite app just got a little bit better – and that’s just never a bad thing.