iTunes 9 Focus: Tips for editing your iPhone apps screens

This might be long overdue. This might not be the best interface. It does beat the snot out of rearranging the 80+ apps on my phone and the 50+ apps on my touch one icon and one screen at a time.
http://www.appzealot.com

A little off topic from iPhone OS 3.1 but has anyone noticed that using the zoom button to shrink iTunes to the mini player no longer works. You have to use the Keyboard shortcut Command+ Shift+M or select it from the View menu.

I loved being able to go from near full screen iTunes to min player on my Desktop in iTunes 6, 7 and 8. Any thought if this is intentional or not?

How long will it take for someone to hack iTunes so that you can change the springboard background color? I shouldn't have to jailbreak just to change the springboard color.

A problem I noticed is that if you delete a page in the editor it will delete the corresponding page on the iDevice. The apps will shift to various pages depending on spaces in iTunes. However on the iDevice, the apps disappear. I can find them via Spotlight and they show up in iTunes as being on the device but, they are nowhere to be found on the springboard. I tested this on 2 iPod Touches and a 3g iPhone and it was the same across all three. If there is a fix and I am just not seeing it, please let me know!

Ok, I may be the odd soul out here, but I'm finding this easy to use and a real time saver. Why so much negativism? Could it be better? Sure. Is it a hell of a lot easier than what I had at my disposal only yesterday? Yes!

Erica,

The first sentence of your article seems to be missing a word. Perhaps, "many" should be included in the first sentence.

Regards,
Jonathan

The only thing I want them to add is the ability to hide native apps if you don't use them. Add a function in the iPhone settings that lets you check or uncheck native apps you want to hide. It won't delete the app from your phone, just hide it. There's no reason why I should be forced to have the compass, stocks and contacts apps taking up space, and we SHOULD have the choice to hide them if we want... And now that you can organize apps straight from iTunes, this function is a no-brainer.

Apple needs to do better. If not Folders, then SOMETHING. Ideas:

1) Category Pages:
- Unlimited pages -- have little triangles pointing off if you make more than 11.
- home button takes you to page #1.
- swipe thru pages just like today
- two-finger swipe to skip to next/prior category page
(optionally up-or-down instead of left/right, maybe)
- color code (maybe just the border) category pages for quick visual reference.
- apps stay put on the category you place them in so you can effectively group all "Games & Fun" stuff together, etc.

2) Copy late-1990's PalmOS where you could assign icons to Categories and then view either "All" or each category (I used to have "Main", "Games", and "Other").

3) Folders. Obvious and boring.

4) Spotlight - List Apps. Just gimmie a quick way to see all the names as text, with options for alphabetical, most-often-used, and most-recently-used. Text is the new GUI.

For all of the above, improve the "jiggling icons" screen a bit more. Instead of "X for Delete", have a menu of options -- Delete, Settings, Category/Folder. (there's no reason for app settings to be buried where they are -- the jiggle-menu is a perfect place)

Should've added: use Spotlight as an app launcher.

The editor is definitely a work in progress. Although they may have bundled it with the iTunes 9 release, I am sure that it will see some significant upgrades as time goes on. And as one comment mentioned, it is way easier then doing it by hand with each individual app on the phone.