There is some buzz around on Twitter about a new phrase for webOS, called power scrolling.

The interesting thing about this feature is, that it was available from the early days of webOS (don’t know which version, but at least 1.3x) and no developer really used it. Or it was used but not mentioned and nobody knows about that feature in an app. The first mention of this phrase was tweeted from the Carbon for webOS developers:

Eureka moment! Wondering what we're calling our double finger scroll gesture? 'Power Scroll'—
Carbon WebOS (@CarbonWebOS) January 18, 2011

since we like this new word and also what it is, here is a little blog post.

So, what does Power scroll mean?

It’s a gesture to scroll with two fingers in a list or scrolling region, and if the gesture is used by an app the list will quickly (animated) jump to the beginning, end left or right, depends on the content and the direction you scrolled. Think about the “tap the header” tap to jump quickly to the top of a screen on iOS devices. But this one, once you got it, is pretty intuitive.

We also played a little with this feature in a beta of a new app that is currently not available to the public and plan to implement this feature also in already existing apps, once we find some good physics to balance the scrolling and gesture detecting.

Let’s hope that more new apps and also existing ones make use of this gesture so that users know this a heavily used gesture that’s available on a nearly every webOS app that has long lists or big scrolling regions.

If you’re a developer and want to know how to implement this in your app, @JayCanuck has posted a snippet that is ready to use for webOS.

What do you think about this feature?