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?
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Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
josh said 5:16PM on 7-21-2008
Appflow anyone?
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FishGuy said 5:24PM on 7-21-2008
It would be beautiful, just turn your home screen to landscape and a (web)application flow screen appears? It could even used cached screen shots of each of the apps as the images. But seriously why can't I rotate more things to landscape? SMS? Notes? YouTube? It would be so easy.
KeynoteKen said 6:13PM on 7-21-2008
But, if you've got over 50 apps, that would still be more motions than performed by the original problem.
Of course, if the goal is that you're enjoying yourself while you're doing it (so that you don't NOTICE the extra taps), then excellent! :)
Nonsanity said 5:22PM on 7-21-2008
Two ideas... The first is simple and not that great: Let the pages loop. Then from the first page, you can flick left or right once to get to two different pages. Trouble with this is that you can more easily get lost in the list, and you lose the sense of one page being "first".
A better idea would be to tap into the pinch function and let the number of app icons on a page increase, shrinking them down to fit. This is much like how the dock works on a Mac. Then you can touch any icon, if you are confident of your accuracy, or pinch to expand the view and scroll around it like in Safari. Or press and hold to zoom in on an area like the text input point interface.
In short, use the input systems that are already familiar and in-place elsewhere in the iPhone to speed up app selection. Heck, replacing the main area of the app selection with a Safari web page of icons would do most of this automatically.
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harald said 5:24PM on 7-21-2008
don't make it to complicated -- imo. at the moment i don't have any problems in the way it works. i group my apps in pages:
1st screen: most needed apps
2nd screen: apps i need for work
3rd page: safari bookmarks
4th page: games
...
i don't now how it get's, if one screen get filled up -- i think you can than easily make sub-groups or think about if you really need any app you have on your iphone.
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Gillian said 5:30PM on 7-21-2008
It's such a pain to move apps from one page to another. And even when I downloaded updates to the apps, the apps switched locations. Apple needs to find a way to EASILY move apps between pages, so that I don't want to throw it against the wall every time I try to do this...
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SloopJohnB said 5:29PM on 7-21-2008
If people were not concerned about having local apps accessible at any time without the need of the internet we would still be using web apps by now. Apple should create tools to help us organize our apps as the app stores grows more each day and users will feel the need for such tool more and more with time. Nobody wants to keep downloading stuff over and over again, these apps are not 1mb, there are games with 50mb or even 120mb.
The scheme i´ve mentioned on the previous post i believe it to be more in harmony with the iphone´s interface. Actually the use of a ´desktop´ inside the folder is more like apple since is more visually appealing, easy and convenient to be able to move your apps inside the folder just as u would on the home screen. It could also use the ´transparent pop up window´ we already see now on the iphone.
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SloopJohnB said 5:31PM on 7-21-2008
If people were not concerned about having local apps accessible at any time without the need of the internet we would still be using web apps by now. Apple should create tools to help us organize our apps as the app stores grows more each day and users will feel the need for such tool more and more with time. Nobody wants to keep downloading stuff over and over again, these apps are not 1mb, there are games with 50mb or even 120mb.
The scheme i´ve mentioned on the previous post i believe it to be more in harmony with the iphone´s interface. Actually the use of a ´desktop´ inside the folder is more like apple since is more visually appealing, easy and convenient to be able to move your apps inside the folder just as u would on the home screen. It could also use the ´transparent pop up window´ we already see now on the iphone.
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nicholasfranklin said 5:41PM on 7-21-2008
Forget the Folders idea, lets go with something more OS X.
Stacks. Simple, working almost identical to the desktop variety (minus the "Fan" method). Click on your "Games" stack, and it windows out to a square giving you 8 or 12 squares containing all your games.
To move things in and out, just drag in and out of the stack. Couldn't be any easier.
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Ryan Trevisol said 5:43PM on 7-21-2008
ONE WORD: STACKS.
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Bob S. said 7:55PM on 7-21-2008
ONE CONSIDERED BIT OF ONOMATOPOEIA: BLEAH
sam said 5:51PM on 7-21-2008
Personally, I would love a way to rearrange my apps on my computer. It is a real bitch dragging each individual app 3 or 4 screens at a time.
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sal said 5:53PM on 7-21-2008
What about having a single "App" button? When pressed, it displays either an alphabetical list or icons for each of the apps installed.
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Chris Kinsman said 6:27PM on 7-21-2008
A guy in our office who has jailbroken his phone, stores a lot of apps in a sort of folder. An icon on his home screen can be tapped, which reveals all the apps in that directory. It works well.
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swatch said 9:29PM on 7-21-2008
This is called "Categories", which someone above scoffed at, but I really liked the idea. For those who like to have a folder for stuff that is rarely used, create a category for "junk" or "misc". All your favorite apps go on the dock, and then you have the rest of your first page for the different categories (folders).
I'm not sure why people wouldn't like this design. It gives a clean look, you don't have to flip through page after page, and you can even change the icon for the folder to whatever you want, for those that like a more artistic design.
I HATE stacks. Just thought I'd throw that in, too. Almost as much as I hate cover flow. It's cool the first time you show someone all your iTunes cover art, but let's not use it as your operating system's main UI.
kiwinerd said 6:36PM on 7-21-2008
All I can say is this: if someone ported TextExpander over to iPhone (or similar), I would pay a very large amount of money for that...
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Austin said 7:17PM on 7-21-2008
Nameable stacks on iPhone please.
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SloopJohnB said 7:41PM on 7-21-2008
The problem with STACKS is where to place them? There are only 4 slots on the iphone´s dock, it´s obviously not like OS X´s dock. If you place Stacks also on the home screen it´s very similar to the ´folder´ idea where instead of a list u´d get a grid of apps. Your dragging idea seems cool though... no need for ´add or ´edit´ buttons, just drag the app and release it over the stack´s icon. Cool :)
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Jackson said 7:54PM on 7-21-2008
After reading the article two things occured to me as possible solution: first, something like Expose or Spaces that worked with the pinch gesture (as previously mentioned); and second, a spring-loaded tab interface so that you could drag the application you wanted to move to the appropriate tab. That always seems like one of the most elegant and functional UI elements out there, and most people understand it. I guess the dots are a take on the tab interface, but if you can't drag the app icon onto the dot you want to jump to, then it's not as useful. But seriously, how many apps do you need on your phone?
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Harbinger said 7:45PM on 7-21-2008
Leave the row above favorites empty, have the row be a slider to quickly move through screens. Folders represented as stacks you can assign a custom icon to. When you create a stack, the icon for an app only shows if you click the stack and doesn't appear on the top level of icons. You'll need an app to create stacks.
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