Holy smokes! There ‘s a desktop app that lets you organize / re-arrange your iPhone apps on your home screens. It ‘s called Movement, it ‘s Mac only, and it requires a jailbroken iPhone to work with “ but it works! Hurrah!
No more messing with wiggly icons and trying to stop them with your finger on just the screen you want them on, without overshooting by one or two screens and buggering up several of them in the process.
I ‘ve been trying out Movement a bit after spotting via a report at CrunchGear “ and have some quick observations and a few screencaps after the jump
So here ‘s the basics on Movement:
It ‘s a free app “ currently for Mac only (hopefully that ‘ll change soon).
Once you launch the app, it gives you simple instructions on how to use it
You start by connecting your iPhone (via the USB/sync cabl) and clicking on the ‘Read Apps ‘ button. It takes a little bit to do that “ and then presents your home screens in columns within its display “ as shown in the screencap at the top of this post.
From that point, you just do what you ‘d expect and what feels natural “ click on an app icon and drag it to your desired new position for it.
This works quickly and smoothly. I changed over my last and second-to-last home screens entirely in a fraction of the time it would ‘ve taken on the iPhone itself.
Once you ‘re content with your re-arranging you just click ‘Write Apps ‘ to make the changes on the iPhone. You ‘ll get a prompt asking if you want to first do a backup (by saving a copy of the springboard.plist file to your /Documents folder) or whether you want to be ‘reckless ‘.
So far, I ‘ve found that you need to manually do a respring (a restart of Springboard) on the iPhone to make the changes show up “ the app doesn ‘t do it for you.
The app feels very much like a ‘beta ‘, which it is. So, at least for me thus far, it seems to have some trouble handling a large number of home screens. The first four or five display accurately, but as I scroll across to the right in Movement ‘s display it gets very patchy “ with various screens only showing partial contents, and some icons displaying incorrectly as well.
This seems to partially resolve itself as I scroll all the way over to the right (to display the final few home screens) and give it a few moments to ‘settle ‘ “ but it is still quite quirky overall.
I ‘m also not sure which iPhone models it supports. My iPhone 3GS worked first time and every time it ‘s connected. My V1 iPhone has not worked at all as yet “ and my 3G is not around for testing just now.
Overall “ quirkiness and beta-ness aside “ this app is a big-time sight for sore eyes. I love it. I will probably do some further house cleaning this evening “ just because I can. 🙂
If you ‘ve got a Mac and a jailbroken iPhone, go get a Movement app download HERE “ and let us know what you think.
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