BACKGROUND

Mobile computing devices are becoming ubiquitous tools for personal, business, and social uses. The portability of mobile computing devices is increasing as the size of the devices decrease and processing power increases. In fact, many computing devices are sized to be hand-held by the user to improve ease of use. Additionally, modern mobile computing devices are equipped with increased processing power and data storage capability to allow such devices to perform advanced processing. Further, many modern mobile computing devices are capable of connecting to various data networks, including the Internet, to retrieve and receive data communications over such networks. As such, modern mobile computing devices are powerful, often personal, tools untethered to a particular location.

To facilitate portability, many mobile computing devices include displays of limited size to thereby decrease the overall size of the device. However, the small display size of mobile computing devices may create difficulties for users in performing certain functions on the mobile computing device. For example, the sorting of data items on a relatively small display can be cumbersome and difficult especially when each data item includes multiple properties. In such circumstances, the user is often required to scroll or pan the viewport of the display to view the additional properties of the sorted data items to fully understand the sort results. This inability to view multiple properties of the data items contemporaneously on the display (e.g., within the viewport of the display) is an even more significant concern when multi-criteria sorts are performed (i.e., the multiple properties of the data items are sorted at the same time). In such cases, the user may be especially interested in, not only the sorted order of the primary property, but also the sorted order of other properties on which the sort was conducted.

