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iPhone 101: Restore your homescreen icons
Rearranging the icons on the home screen of your iPhone is a part of the customization fun that Apple built in. However, if you rearranged your icons and want them back to factory specifications, it is as easy as a simple tap. Just navigate to Settings > General > Reset. Once there, select the "Reset Home Screen Layout" button. A dialog will pop-up asking for a confirmation.Once you return to the home screen, you will notice that all the icons are placed just like they were when you first turned on your iPhone! Third-party applications' icons will follow the default applications. Want more iPhone tips and tricks like this? Just visit the TUAW iPhone 101 section.
Re-thinking the iPhone's home screen
The iPhone's home screen works just fine with 16 application icons on the main screen and four more on the dock at the bottom. It still works well with another screenful of 16 more apps on the adjacent screen. But, says Chris Devers, as you start adding more apps, the home screen UI doesn't scale well to cope with them. Flicking across five screens of apps to find the one you want is time-consuming. And moving an app from screen five to screen three is chaotic, unless you've left "gaps" on each screen as you went along - in which case you'd have six to juggle, not five. And even then, it's still chaotic.OK, so not everyone is going to be collecting that many third party apps. But for people who do, says Chris, there needs to be a better solution than this. He's posted a set on Flickr to illustrate his point.What might work? A Quicksilver- or Spotlight-style app, where you type some characters from the name of the app you want and it gets launched? Or a gesture launcher, where you "draw" what you're looking for?
iPhone 101: Two Home screen tricks
Here are two simple but useful tips from TUAW readers David B Alford and Andrew Akker that help you navigate through your iPhone or iPod home screens. David points out that if you tap just to the left or to the right of the dots at the bottom of your screen, you can move a page at a time without having to drag. Tap left, you move left. Tap right, you move right. It's quick and it's easy. Andrew figured out how to pause his drag Home screen drags. If you start to move between screens by dragging and then tap the dots control during that drag, screen pauses. You'll see bits of both home screens at once, and can interact with them normally by tapping icons. You can see up to 24 icons at once (16 off to one side, 4 along the other side, and 4 in the bar at the bottom). I've tested both tips extensively and they work great -- two really nice additions to one's Home-screens skills.
iPhone January update, coming soon to an iTunes near you
I don't know about you all, but considering I'm not in the market for a pricey, tiny notebook, and I don't need yet another thing hooked up to my TV, the best news I heard at the Keynote today was about this iPhone "January update" (does that mean there'll be one every month?) coming soon to your iTunes. Included in the free update to iPhone users: An updated Maps that will actually find your location automatically by triangulating cell towers (we saw this a while ago), and give you the option to add a pin to the map Web Clips, cutouts of web pages that you can attach to an icon sitting right there on the homescreen. A customizable homescreen and dock (just hold an icon to get them wiggling, and then move them around as you please), and up to nine homescreen pages total The update will also add chapter navigation for iPhone video, and subtitle/audio options as well. And though the readers in our IRC channel weren't very impressed with this one, the iPhone will now feature multiple SMS sending. Very awesome update for the iPhone, completely free and available on download in iTunes right now (!), and definitely an update that will set the stage for all the third party applications we're supposed to see next month. Bring on the SDK!
