1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments relate to methods for influencing the presentation of image information displayed on a display device of a piece of information technology equipment. Embodiments may also relate to a computer program product for a respective control device of a piece of information technology equipment that executes these methods, a data carrier with a computer program product stored on it and a piece of information technology equipment with a control device that is designed for the execution of the aforementioned methods. Finally, embodiments relate to the use of a control device for controlling the display device of a piece of information technology equipment.
2. Background of the Related Art
Information technology equipment in terms of the present invention includes, for example, desktop computers, laptops or notebooks as well as mobile phones, in particular so-called Smartphones, tablet computers, MP3 players, portable video or DVD players, etc. Increasingly, such information technology equipment, referred to in short as IT equipment below, features a so-called touchscreen, that is, a display device that is touch-sensitive and can therefore be used by a user for controlling the display device. Increasingly so-called swipe motions or swipe gestures are used and serve as control motions. Such swipe gestures are, for example, vertical scrolling through lists or horizontal scrolling between different views in an image gallery, for example. The swipe gestures are often motions of the hand or finger of the user of such equipment. Since such equipment has only display devices of a limited size, it is not easy to guarantee the precision of such swipe gestures. Thus, each swipe gesture performed allows only for a certain amount of scrolling in order to achieve a certain minimum precision level for the procedure. Then scrolling must begin anew by interrupting or ending the swipe gesture and returning the respective finger to the starting point to repeat the swipe gesture.
Thus, to carry out several swipe gestures, a relatively long path must be covered by the finger that executes the swipe gesture with a big portion of the covered path being useless because it only serves to return the finger to the starting point of the swipe gesture. Such long paths also increase the time required to perform such swipe gestures.
It is further known to take the speed of the swipe gestures into account in order to accelerate scrolling in longer lists. However, this decreases the accuracy of the scrolling process because stopping it cannot be influenced directly.
It is also known to provide a separate scrollbar as an alternative for scrolling. However, the disadvantage of this is that space is lost for the actual objective, namely the presentation of information, due to the obviously limited area on the display device.