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 …
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TAGS: Organizing iPhone home screens
