Genome Browser on iPhone Safari: It's not obvious how to zoom in and out of the channel area, e.g. ref seq, and it's tricky and clunky

[leehart]

No description provided.

[benjeffery]

Dupe of panoptes/#517?

[leehart]

Maybe, although there's not much space for human fingers to pinch zoom on the ref seq.
One of the current problems is that tapping is the way to zoom, but because of the lack of space it's easy to accidentally zoom the whole page rather than the channel.
One thing that would help with the space issue would be to allow the side panel to contract/hide, although that would be the second side-menu in the app (or third if you include the hamburger menu).
Another problem that this glosses over is the lack of instruction / in-app help. Whether we expect users to zoom by tapping or by pinching, they are left to discover it themselves. I expect that pinching is the gesture users would go to first, and is probably less problematic than tapping. (The user can actually pinch zoom the whole page though, so we're back to the space/targeting issue.)
As with the map problem, when things are too small to use gestures, I think there should be a straight-forward couple of + & - buttons for zooming. That would eliminate the hidden control problem and the accidental control problem, but clutters the interface with more buttons. (Space is always an issue on pocket devices!) Made for buttery ham-fisted fingers.