An electronic device displays one or more views of a software application with a plurality of gesture recognizers including at least one discrete gesture recognizer, configured to send a single action message in response to a respective gesture; and at least one continuous gesture recognizer, configured to send action messages at successive recognized sub-events of a respective recognized gesture. The device detects one or more events and processes each event using one or more of the gesture recognizers, including: processing the respective event at a respective gesture recognizer in accordance with a respective gesture definition corresponding to the respective gesture recognizer, and conditionally sending one or more respective action messages to the software application in accordance with an outcome of the processing of the respective event. The device executes the software application in accordance with one or more action messages received from one or more of the gesture recognizers.