While “giving the finger” is generally frowned upon in a civilized society, the use of multi-finger gestures can increase productivity on the iPad.

In October 2011, Apple released an upgrade to iOS, iOS 5, which officially incorporated the use of multi-finger gestures.

Once mastered, these gestures nearly eliminate the need to press the Home Button and significantly speed moving between and closing applications.

By now you have likely mastered using two fingers to zoom in and out and move between the Home Screens, and double tapping to zoom.  With a little practice, you will master these multi-finger gestures and never look back.

Five-finger pinch: Use all of your fingers to grab the screen to return to the Home Screen regardless of what application you are working in.

Four-finger swipe up: Rather than double tap the Home Button, swipe four fingers upward to see the multitasking bar that shows you the apps currently running.  Once the multitasking bar is in view, select a different app, hold down an app to put until it “wiggles” if you want to close it (by tapping the red circle containing a minus sign) or swipe four fingers down to hide the multitasking bar.

Four-finger swipe left / right: Alternatively, swipe left or right to move through apps that are still running, rather than using than resorting to the multitasking bar.  You could plan ahead by opening your most often used apps one after the other so that you can quickly move between them using the four-finger left/right swipe.

If the gestures do not seem to be available, make sure you are running iOS 5 or later and that multi-finger gestures are activated on your iPad.  Look in Settings, General, Multitasking Gestures to set the slider to On.

The views expressed on this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of LH&M.