iPhone Home Screen Organization
One of the little things about the iPhone that continues to annoy me is that there’s no easy way to organize your apps and bookmarks on the home screen. I had held out hope that something would be introduced in the 3.0 OS but, at least as far as I have seen and heard (without running 3.0 myself), this has not happened.
Apple has introduced Spotlight searching into 3.0. This will be really helpful, but still won’t do what I’m looking for. Spotlight on the iPhone looks to work much like it does on the desktop, and it should be a great way to quickly launch apps. I use Spotlight all the time to launch apps on the desktop. Still, I use the Dock for my primary apps and I like to keep it just how I like it. The same goes for the iPhone screens.
As I add more and more apps to the iPhone, I like to—in a general sense—keep them organized. The first two pages are dedicated to core apps and go-to bookmarks, page 3 may have all the photo apps, page 4 for games, etc. As anyone that’s tried to manage a bunch of apps knows, moving something from page 4 to page 1 is a pain. You have to drag it screen to screen, and the icons on the screens that you’re passing through get jumbled up as you move through them. Some people keep an empty row at the bottom of each page to avoid this, but I never liked this solution.
Recently I’ve been keeping the last screen open and using it as a sort-of holding area. Apps that I just downloaded and wanted to try out, things I may be testing, etc. all live on this page. If I like them and want to keep them around, they’ll get moved to a more organized page, and if not, they’ll be deleted. As a result, there’s usually not more than 4-5 apps on that last page.
Using The iPhone’s Dock As A Clipboard
It wasn’t until I started keeping this “test” page that I realized I could use the space here, in combination with the Dock slots, to allow the dock to act as a clipboard. This allows apps to be dropped down to the dock, and neatly moved from screen to screen without messing up the order of any of the other pages.
Here’s how I do it: Say I want to swap an app from the main screen with one on the 3rd page. What I will do is scroll to the very last page that has tons of space and then press and hold an icon until it’s ready to be moved. I’ll then move 2+ icons out of the dock and drop them on the last page. I know I can easily go back and get them afterwards.
I then go to the front page and select the app that I want to move. In this case, it’s November 2009 (the Red Sox won the World Series) and I want to move the MLB At-Bat app to the 3rd page for the off-season. I drag the MLB App to dock, and then swipe to page 3. I’ll need to move something from here to make room for MLB, so I decide to put my Flickr bookmark on page 1. I drag the Flickr bookmark to the dock, and then drag MLB At-Bat up to take it’s spot.
From there, I simply hit the home button to get back to the home screen, click and hold the Flckr bookmark until it’s ready to be moved, and then drag it up to the slot that’s been left open by MLB At-Bat.
At this point all the apps are on the screens that I want them to be on, and nothing has gotten out of order. All that’s left to do is go back to the last page and drag my primary dock apps back to where they belong. I hit the home button to lock them all in, and everything is set.
This isn’t the cleanest solution in the world, but until Apple creates a way to manually manage the app organization (via iTunes would be nice), this is pretty simple and saves a lot of headaches.
Take a look at the video below for a basic rundown of what I’m talking about. There’s a chance this is the most obvious tip in the world, but I haven’t seen anyone else mention it, so maybe it’ll be a help to some.
