When you have a long lists of items and you want to let the user interact with one of the items contextually - a common solution is to use the hover-tools pattern in a desktop browser environment. The benefit is that you don't cluttering the user interface with a lot of repetitive controls.
The list could such as show a bunch of links and you want to save or comment one of those links.
(The interaction design pattern is discussed here:) http://patternry.com/p=hover-reveal-tools/
But, as we all know, on touch devices we don't have hover. On iOS we have the Edit button but that is usually for bulk actions and that is not what I'm after.
Do we have a pattern that could work for both mouse based and touch based interfaces?