MacMost Now 696: Arranging Apps In iOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at arranging apps on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. So if you're like me, your home screens of your iPad and iPhone are a mess, filled with tons of apps in no particular order. You can clean it up by moving apps around and creating app folders. And you can even decide what apps go onto the dock-like area at the bottom of the screen. Let's take a look. So to demonstrate, I'm going to use an iPad here in horizontal orientation. This works in vertical orientation. It works on the iPhone. It works on the iPod touch, with some minor differences. So you've got your apps here. I've got pretty crowded screens on my first screen. You can see my second screen here. I've got a bunch of different apps. Let's say I wanted to organize things a little bit better. One of the things I could do is move apps around. So say I wanted to move an app like Photo Booth and move it to the next screen to create some space here. What I would do is tap and hold over any of the app icons. And what happens is they all start jiggling like this. Now I can tap and drag any of the icons, move it to a separate part of the screen here. So you can do it like this. Or I can go to the edge of the screen and it will push over to the next screen. And I can drop the app there. Now it's important to realize that the list on the screen is really a linear list. It starts with the first one here on the upper left-hand corner and goes two and then three and all the way down. So while on the iPad, where you can fit five across horizontally, if I turned vertically, you can see the order's maintained, one, two, three, four, five, etc., except now there's only four across. So you're not really placing them at a location on the screen. You are placing them in an order and they are shown in order. Now the other thing you could do is you can swipe back and forth while you're still in that jiggle mode and you can drag and drop one app onto another to create an app folder. So for instance, if I wanted to take these two apps. I drag this one on top of this. It will create an app folder. It'll give the app folder a name. It'll guess based on the categories. But I can tap in that area there and change it to anything I want. And then, done! And then I can rearrange the apps inside of there. I can tap outside. And if I want to add another app to that app folder, I just drag it into it. And the app folder itself can be dragged around and moved to different screens. You can do anything you want. If you tap it to open, you can change its name. You can change the order of the apps inside. And if you wanted to drag an app outside, you can simply do it like that. And you can also drag apps down into the toolbar below. So on the iPad, I've got some more space here. I can drag in another app, like iBooks here, into that space below. And it will stay there, even in vertical orientation. It kind of compresses it a little bit more. And you can see that I can actually fit up to six apps here at the bottom. And I can drag them out as well. When you're done arranging your apps, just simply tap the Home button once and all the jiggling will stop, and you're back in normal mode. Your apps are set anywhere they want. I should add that if you swipe all the way to the left, you can go to the search screen. So, I find it very useful, especially when I have a lot of app folders, to quickly find an app this way just by typing in the beginning of the name. And then you can go to it. So you can kind of use the search screen as a launcher for getting to apps quickly. You can dump a whole bunch of apps you use into folders, and then use that search screen to actually launch them. You don't have to remember where they are. So I hope you found this look at arranging apps on your iOS device useful. Til next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.