My homescreen before the challenge
Last week I talked about an homescreen experiment I was going to do. I’m pretty happy with the result, but before I start to show it to you I’d like to make a recap of what it actually is, quoting Minimalmac:
See here is the deal, I have come to believe that the only icons that should be on the first screen are the ones you really use. And by use I mean at least once a week and ideally several times a day. And while I can say for certain that applies to many of the apps that you see in this screenshot, others I am less sure about.
Therefore, here is the plan. With the exception of those in the “dock” area (Phone, Mail, Messages, and Safari) which I consider crucial to the entire point of even having an iPhone, I am going to clear everything from the home screen. Any apps that get accessed more than once in the course of the next week will be allowed to come back.
Unlike other iphone users, I tend to use many apps every day. Some of them are used in the morning when I’m at school, some of them before going to sleep, and others are used all day long.
So what about my homescreen? First of all, every app I take into consideration must follow MinimalMac’s rule of being used at least twice. Then I decided to go this way: if I only use an app in a particular period of the day it goes to the second page. If I use it all day day it stays in the first one.
At the top of the post you can see my previous homescreen, now take a look at what it is now.
My homescreen after the challenge
Although I followed the rules, I’ve broken them two times, first time for SimpleNote and the second for Foobi.
I don’t use SimpleNote on a daily basis but I need to be able to write in a note as quick as possible so keeping it in another homescreen wouldn’t be so productive and would annoy me. Foobi is a food tracker and I open it the first available moment after I’m done eating a meal. My memory sucks and I would forgot to track the food if I moved it away from the initial homescreen.
My homescreen didn’t change too much after the challenge, but it was a way to re-think about the apps I have installed on my iphone. I rarely use an app from the third or the fourth page, so what’s the point of keeping them? I don’t know. Months ago I said that you should delete every “just in case” and I did it, but now my iphone is filled again with these apps. Time to do a major cleaning?
What about you? Have you tried to do the challenge? What are your results?
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hope there would be "Recent Items" on the nth homescreen page in Settings .
This is an interesting experiment and one I would like to try myself. Now if only I could find the time to do so. My SpringBoard has gotten terribly unorganized because I haven't had the time to sit down for an hour or two and work out a good organization method. One of my biggest problems is I get used to an app being in a certain place. Then, even if it makes more sense for it to be somewhere else, it slows me down to organize things properly because I keep going back to the old place looking for the app.
Just this weekend I finally ran out of SpringBoard pages, so I began creating new Stacks. I've always had one Stack on my dock which contains all my music apps (iPod, Pandora, Last.FM, Shoutcast, and iHeartRadio). Now I have three more Stacks. One I call 'Local' which has all those fun GPS aware apps to find things like Yelp, AroundMe, Where, Geodelic, Flixster, Urbanspoon, and I also threw in Speed Test and Mark the Spot. Another Stack I call 'Tweaks' which are all the icons for the jailbreak tweaks which rarely need access to those icons (Backgrounder, Notifier, WinterBoard, LogMailer, CrashReporter, AddExchange, Snappy). Then I made a Stack for 'Games'.
With just these 4 Stacks, I now have only 4 SpringBoard pages and I'm able to easily keep everything I regularly and semi-regularly use on the same page (by putting the semi-regular Local and Music apps in a stack). I guess I'm completely moving away from the point of your experiment, I just feel if Apple would finally give us better organization methods, such an experiment wouldn't be necessary.
That said, thanks for sharing your experience.
Thank you for sharing yours. I like your idea and I'll probably test it out. Anyway, i don't see why we couldn't use both, they do not interfer with each other
My home screen is reserved for 2 kinds of apps. Apps used daily, and apps trying out to make the daily use cut (such as the newly released Siri).
This sounds so logical … it's amazing that i didn't think about it until you said it, but i'm going to try that and see how it works out.
http://www.designsbykosi.info/iphone-tips/
Hope it works for you as well!
i have five columns on my SB so my front page features up to 25 icons. 7 of them are Categories (with CategoriesSB installed) so this means that I can get to 175 apps with two or fewer touches. My front page is limited to the best of the best plus the categorized stuff.
does anyone know what these is shown here??
does anyone know what theme is shown here??
matte ui + matte icons. there are some icons that I've actually created and others that I've taken at shawnblanc.com
thanks for the info… having a hard time finding the icons tho
I use Lockinfo as my “Home page” which shows current plus five day weather forcast, email, ,SMS, push notifications, missed calls, voice mail… On page two all my apps are sorted into eight folders/ “Categories.”
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