Most iPod touch activities start at the Home screen, which you get to by pressing the Home button located at the bottom of the iPod touch. Along the bottom of the Home screen, you see the toolbar; this toolbar is visible when you view most of the Home screen’s pages so that you have easy access to the buttons it contains (more on the Home screen shortly). Above the toolbar, you see applications on iPod touch that do all sorts of cool things; as you install applications, the number of buttons increases. You can also create bookmarks for websites and store them as buttons on the Home screen. As you add applications and bookmarks, the number of pages of the Home screen increases so you can store them all on it. You can organize the buttons on the pages of the Home screen in anyway you’d like.

The following figures highlight the major ways you control iPod touch. A tap is just what it sounds like; you gently press a finger to the iPod touch’s screen over the item you want to control and then lift your finger up again. To drag, you place your finger on the screen and move it across the screen without lifting it up. (You don’t need to apply pressure, just contact.) To pinch or unpinch, place two fingers on the screen and drag them together or move them apart.

There are lots of things you do with an iPod touch that require you to type, and iPod touch’s keyboard is pretty amazing. Whenever you need it, whether it’s for emailing, entering a website URL, performing a search, and so on, it pops up automatically.

To type, just tap the keys. As you tap each key, the character you tap pops up in a small window so you can see what you entered, which is useful feedback for you. (You also hear audio feedback if you haven’t disabled it.) The keyboard includes all the standard keys you expect. To change from letters to numbers and special characters, just tap the .?123 key. (Tap the ABC key to return to letters.) It also has contextual keys that appear when you need them. For example, when you are entering a website address, the .com key appears so you can enter these four characters with a single tap.

If you type a word that the iPod touch doesn’t recognize, it makes a suggestion about what it thinks is the correct word in a pop-up box. To accept the suggestion, tap the space key. To reject the suggestion, tap the pop-up box to close it and keep what you typed. You can also use this feature for shorthand typing. For example, to type “I’ll” you can simply type “Ill” and iPod touch will suggest “I’ll” which you can accept by tapping the Space key.

iPod touch also attempts to correct the capitalization of what you type as well. It also automatically selects the Cap key when you start a new sentence.

To edit text, tap and hold on the text you want to edit. A magnifying glass icon appears on the screen, and within it you see a magnified view of the location of the cursor. Drag the magnifying glass to where you want to make changes and then lift your finger from the screen; the cursor remains in that location, and you can use the keyboard to make changes to the text or to add text at that location.

You can also select text or images to copy and paste the selected content into a new location. Tap and hold down briefly where you want to start the selection until the magnifying glass icon appears; then lift your finger off the screen. The Select menu appears. Tap Select to select part of the content on the screen or tap Select All to select everything in the current window.

You see markers indicating where the selection starts and stops. (The iPod touch attempts to select something logical, such as the word or sentence.)

Drag the two markers so the content you want to select is between them; the selected portion is highlighted in blue. As you drag, a magnified view of where the selection marker is appears to help you place it more accurately. When the selection markers are located correctly, lift your finger from the screen. (If you tapped the Select All command, you don’t need to do this because the content you want to copy is already selected.)

Tap Cut to remove the content from the current window or Copy to just copy it.

Move to where you want to paste the content you selected. Tap where you want the content to be pasted; for a more precise location, tap and hold and then use the magnifying glass icon to move to a specific location. Tap Paste.

The content you copied or cut appears where you placed the cursor.

Earlier, you read that the Home screen is the jumping-off point for many of the things you do with your iPod touch because that is where you access the buttons you tap to launch applications, move to website bookmarks you’ve saved there, and configure your iPod touch’s settings.

The Home screen actually has multiple pages. To move to a page, drag to the left to move to later pages or to the right to move to earlier pages. Or tap the dot corresponding to the page you want to move to.

If you move all the way to the “left,” you see the Search page. Using this tool, you can search your iPod touch. The objects you search, such as email, music, and such are determined by settings you can configure. (This is covered in Chapter 14, “Customizing an iPod touch.”)

To perform a search, tap in the Search bar and type. As you type, items that meet your search are shown on the list below the Search bar. When you’re done typing the search term, tap Search.

The results are organized into sections, which are indicated by icons along the left edge of the screen, such as email, contacts, and so on. To see the detail of an item, tap it. The results remain so that you can always move back to the results screen to work with other items you found.

At the top of the screen, you see various icons that provide you with information, such as if you are connected to a Wi-Fi network, the time, the state of iPod touch’s battery, and so on. Keep an eye on this area as you use iPod touch.

When an iPod touch is asleep and you press the Wake/Sleep button or the Home button, the iPod wakes up, and its screen activates; you see the Unlock slider. Drag the slider to the right to unlock iPod touch so that you can work with it. You move to the iPod touch Home screen or to the last screen you were using.

In most cases, you should just put iPod touch to sleep when you aren’t using it instead of shutting it off. It doesn’t use much power when it sleeps, and it wakes up quickly when you want to start using it again. (In fact, you seldom need to turn iPod touch off.)

To change iPod touch’s volume, tap the up or down Volume buttons. If you aren’t on a screen that shows the Volume slider, an icon pops up to show you the relative volume you are setting. When the volume is right, release the volume button.

If you want to turn iPod touch off, press and hold the Wake/Sleep button until the red slider appears at the top of the screen. Drag the slider to the right to shut iPod touch down.

To restart iPod touch, press and hold the Wake/Sleep button until the Apple logo appears on the screen. In a moment, you see iPod touch’s Home screen, and it’s ready for you to use again.

The first time you sync information via MobileMe (or if you reset your sync options), you decide how you want information to be moved. You are prompted via the MobileMe Sync Alert dialog.

During syncs, you are prompted when the amount of data changes beyond the limits you set on the MobileMe Preferences control panel or the MobileMe pane of the System Preferences application. For example, you might choose to be notified when more than 5% of the computer’s data will change. When this happens, you see a dialog that enables you to make selections about how data is moved. You can use the controls in this dialog to review the changes and accept or prevent them as you see fit. When you’ve decided, you click the appropriate Sync button to allow the sync to proceed. If these prompts get too annoying, move back to the MobileMe preferences and increase the percentage of data change that triggers a notification or disable the notifications entirely.