Where did I see an iPhone "scroll bar" like the Contacts app's list of letters?

November 19, 2008 6:44 AM

This might be a dumb question about my iPhone 3G (latest software update): where did I see some sort of scroll bar down the side of a list (of names? songs?) that functions similarly to the list of letters along the side of the screen in the Contacts application? Instead of letters, it was a series of horizontal bars that indicated relative position over the full length of whatever the list was. Made scrolling through a super long list quick and easy. Did I make this up? Googling hasn't turned up anything useful, but pointers there would be helpful, too. Thanks in advance.
posted by jroybal to Technology (8 answers total)

If I get what you're talking about, I see that when I browse albums on my ipod touch
posted by chndrcks at 7:01 AM on November 19, 2008

Is the horizontal scroll bar in the Settings what you're thinking of?
posted by ahughey at 7:12 AM on November 19, 2008

(and I'm seeing the same thing in Clock if you have a long list of world clocks or alarms.)
posted by ahughey at 7:14 AM on November 19, 2008

Thanks, chndrcks. Browsing through the list of albums has the list of letters, but not the lines. If I recall correctly, these lines look similar to the scroll bar used to travel back and forth through backups in Leopard's Time Machine.
posted by jroybal at 7:16 AM on November 19, 2008

It sounds like you're talking about the letters on the right side of the screen when you look at a long list of contacts. (You can get to them either through the phone application or the stand-alone contacts application. If you haven't rearranged your programs, the contacts appp is on the second screen by defult, I think.)
posted by buriedpaul at 8:53 AM on November 19, 2008

Sorry, Joybal. I completely misread your question.
posted by buriedpaul at 9:33 AM on November 19, 2008

ahughey: I see what you are referring to, but I was thinking this bar could be used to move up and down a long page by tapping at any point along the right-hand side of the screen, rather than just acting as a visual indicator.
posted by jroybal at 10:13 AM on November 19, 2008

For future reference: I found out where I saw it. Through Apple's Remote app when controlling my computer's iTunes library. It appears in a playlist that has 100 or more items. For playlists that have 99 or less items, the standard visual indicator is active. Wish this feature would make it's way into iPhone's iPod app.
posted by jroybal at 3:33 PM on November 26, 2008