Ugh – Re-Arranging iPhone Home Screens Sucks
Today I hit my 8th iPhone home screen. I know you can go nine, but I also know my screens hadn’t been trimmed and properly organized in quite a while – apps were not grouped together in any sensible way, and I even had some apps hanging around that are just rarely ever used. So it was time for some major housekeeping!
And of course any level of housekeeping / re-arranging of iPhone home screens is an infernal pain in the arse. At least that’s what I think, and judging by responses to my tweets moaning about this, lots of folks agree. It really is stupid that Apple has not either given us a decent application launcher, or folders method, or anything that is FAR more clever than the current useless, badly-behaving wiggly icons that rebel against being shoved into place where you want them; or allowed 3rd party developers to do so. I feel very sure that if Apple would just allow it, there would be no shortage of clever ideas out there.
Read on for a few more thoughts that occurred to me while re-arranging, as well as some screencaps of which apps are currently staying and which are getting ditched …
Some other things that struck me while re-doing my home screens:
- It is so easy to accumulate a whole bunch of apps that, when you really think about it, you rarely ever use
- I have way too many movie information apps – three I think – must re-try these and pick a single best one to keep (suggestions very welcome)
- Sorting out home screens sucks
For anyone who might be interested, here’s some quick highlights (won’t bore you with every single screen) of what’s staying and what’s going:
The screencap at the top of this post shows my current first home screen – yeah, I’m boring and have stuck to the defaults on my dock, and have let all the standard apps stay on the first screen. Not sure about keeping the Contacts icon on there much longer, but Things is definitely my favorite for managing tasks, so it will be staying.
Here’s my second screen, with a bunch of most frequently used apps, some are pretty ‘specialist’ and help me in what I do (like iBlogger) but most are potentially super-useful for most folks – Google Mobile, vlingo, Evernote and so on:
Here’s a current favorite games screen:
This one is the apps I’ve decide to axe:
Most of these are good apps, but I’ve just found I hardly ever use them, for a variety of reasons. OmniFocus Notebooks and Blackjack don’t get any love because I have a clear favorite that does the same thing. A couple of them I downloaded mostly for my daughter and she now has them on ‘her’ iPhone, so I don’t need them on here, and a couple I just didn’t like.
That’s 12 apps removed. Down to 7 home screens, and it’s really 6, as I’ve kept one aside temporarily for a group of voice recording apps I’m looking at – it will be six soon. Not exactly a huge clearout, but it feels good nonetheless. My screens are now better arranged, with most frequently used apps closer to the first home screen, and some half-decent grouping done in places as well.
I still can’t help asking why must this has to be so hard to do, and still feel frustrated by it. Wayne Schulz (an excellent writer for an excellent site, Gear Diary) mentioned on Twitter that he thinks we won’t see this get better until the Palm Pre launches (and puts the iPhone to shame in this area presumably). I hope he’s wrong. I hope Apple is already embarassed at what we’ve seen in the Pre demos.
What do you all think? How do you manage your home screens, how often do you spend time on this, and how much fun do you have???
UPDATE: Just saw another idea or how to manage screens, via a comment on Friendfeed from Marko Bon. He color codes his home screens – take a look at them HERE …
Yet another reason for you to jailbreak and use Categories, or Stack apps…..
PS: glad I can subscribe to comments
“”TIP”" Move 3 of your 4 bottom line apps to another window. This gives you 3 slots to work with. Think of it like freecell. No credit to me. I read it somewhere else.
I have 8 windows in use. None of them are full. I keep my most used on the 1st. The next two are for applications I use often.
The remaining ones I use to hold stuff I’m evaluating/reviewing, with the last two pages being an unemptied trash can.
With a 16 gig phone and 6 gig of music, that leaves me around 10 gig to play with. Right now, I have a total of 6 Gig free. Wow. Thats more space than my first 5 computers had… LOL
Sebastien – I might give jailbreak a try again at some point. I tried Categories when I was jailbroken and didn’t love it – probably more to do with me and not working that well with folders etc. Something like Stacks or even Nate True’s old ‘Dock’ app suits me better. That’s why I’d really like to see some good app launchers.
ssschmidt – Interesting. when you say 3 of your 4 bottom line apps you mean those in the dock? I may give that kinda system a go at some point – right now I’m just glad to be don with housekeeping
Yeah. I meant the dock. That way you can move 3 at a time to the dock, go to the page you want them on, move them off. Less dealing with the jello icons.
ssschmidt – OK, got it. It does sound interesting, but I don’t know that I have 3 apps that are more often used than the four that are on the dock by default …
You move the apps that were in your dock back when you are done.
I would want something like this as a solution:
Managing IPhone apps on iTunes is for now a non existing art. I mean, what can we do with just a list of icons and names?
What if:
1) We could manage the icons on iTunes with the same configuration of our iPhone screens?- There would be space to see several screens at once and drag icons from one to anyone other with the mouse.
- There could be a buffer area to put apps on hold until we drag them to the desired screen.
- There could be an area to drag apps to uninstall them. From this area we would drag icons to the desired iPhone screen to install them.
- There could be some auto-arrange rules defined by us like classify apps from 5 to 1 stars and put them on order of preference, or organize them by type (games, utilities, productivity, etc) where we choose which type to each screen, or even mix these rules. The rules could be saved like playlists and chosen later at will.
- Of course this organized screens would pass to iPhone by sync.
2) Also Clicking on any icon should open the app store on that app. Sometimes I don’t remember what a given app is and the info on iTunes is null. I have to manually search for that name on the app store.
I don’t think this would be dificult to implement on iTunes. Most of this work it’s already done for the Music Library management.
What do you think? Would this help you?
@ ssschmidt – DOH – OK, now I do get it
@ cdamion2 – I like your ideas a lot. I think a lot of people would like to see something cool done in iTunes. I’d still also like to see some good app launchers on the iPhone itself as well …
Great article. Apps management is one more thing that Apple needs to fix ASAP. I don’t need tabs, just a way to rearrange apps from the desktop.
It’s just a darn shame that there is no clear way to express your desires to apple. At least where you can see if someone actually looked at it. But, maybe that’s why Mac’s work so well. 1 person decides instead of listening to the users.
billso – Thanks! It seems this is definitely another of those hot topics for lots of iPhone users.
ssschmidt – I imagine you already know about this one, but just in case, there is their feedback form:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Actually, I didn’t. I’m slacking. But, I guess I can fire up a spamming campaign demanding home screen customization via I-Tunes.
Not that I would actually waste the spam. it’s good grilled.
I have three pages of apps — two of them are full, the third is just the stupid default apps I can’t get rid of (stocks, contacts, some other one I forgot)
Rags – man, I can’t see my self ever getting down to three pages. Would like to, but can’t see it happening …