9/22/209:00 am How To Customize Your iOS 14 Home Screen iOS 14 allows you to place custom widgets on your Home Screen mixed in with your apps. You can also use a trick to create custom app icons to create a Home Screen that looks unique. You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads). Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to customize your iPhone's Home Screen in iOS 14. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 750 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. So iOS 14 changes several things about how the Home Screen on your iPhone works. You can use some of these changes to highly customize the Home Screen adding widgets next to your icons. First here's a quick overview. You have your Home Screen which starts off looking pretty much like it did in iOS 13. If you swipe to the left you can see your widget screen which is a little different. You can now stack widgets on top of each other. So at the top here I've got a photo widget and I can scroll through various different widgets like that. I can create a stack by taking one and dragging it onto another and that would actually stack those two widgets. You could see here I already have a widget stack there and I would just be adding a third one to that. Also while you're in customize mode you can remove anyone you want. You can hit the Plus button here at the top to add a new one. You could also go down to the bottom here, hit Customize, and you could add widgets to that bottom section there from different apps that you have. Now if we go all the way over to the right there's a new screen at the end of your Home Screen that shows all of your apps by category. So you can tap on an app here to launch it or if the category has more than four apps, like for instance the Social category there, I can tap on the grouping at the lower right and dive into it. Tap anywhere to go back up. I can also tap in the Search field at the top and I get a full alphabetical list of all of my apps. I can look for an app alphabetically or search for it here. Now let's look at customizing these Home Screens. You can still do the same things you did before. You could tap and hold any app or tap and Hold a blank space and now everything wiggles. You can remove an app by hitting the minus button there and you can move apps around by dragging them and putting them in different places. So put one app on top of another to create a folder. That's all the same as before. But now in addition to that you can add widgets to your Home Screen right in with the app icons. So I'm going to tap the Plus button at the top left and I can add a widget. The widgets I have listed here depend on the apps I have installed. So some are pretty standard like Maps, News, Music. Those are default apps. But other widgets will appear here depending upon which apps you have installed. As an example lets add a simple Clock app. Tap Clock and it will go and show me the different widgets available for that app. There are three of them You can tell that by the three dots at the bottom. I can swipe between them. So two of these are small squares and they take up the same space as four app icons. This last one takes up a horizontal space equivalent to eight icons. So I can choose which one I want to add. Let's add this one here. I'll tap Add Widget and it throws it in there with the app icons. I can drag it around and position it anywhere I want on the screen with those icons. In addition while I'm in Edit mode here I could tap it and now I could customize it. In this case the clock has a simple customization which is which city do I want the time shown for. So I could set it for my local city there and that will change the app. Other widgets will have different settings. So, for instance, let's add one for News. In News there are a whole bunch of different widgets that you can add. So let's, for instance, add one for a specific topic. I'll tap Add Widget. Now you can see I've added one that takes up the space of eight app icons. If I tap it here I can select the topic. So I can pick from different things that I want and now that's the topic that's going to be represented there. So let's add one to this screen. I'll tap the Plus button there and I'll go and add one down here from Weather. You can see weather has three different widgets there. I'll use this one here. You could see this one pretty much takes up half of the screen. I could tap it and change the location that's shown. Hit Done. So now you could see I've got all of these widgets along with the app icons that are there. Now another thing people are doing is customizing their app icons. Now actually you can't customize an app icon. You have to use the icon created by the developer that's built into the app. But the way people are getting around that is by creating a shortcut. A shortcut can have any icon you want and a shortcut can simply be a way to launch that app. So I'm going to go into the Shortcuts app here and I'm going to create one of these. So I'm going to hit the Plus button at the top right and I'm going to Add an Action. The action I'm going to search for is simply Open App. I'm going to tap that and choose the app I want to launch. Say I simply want to do the Camera app. I'll select that and now all it does is launch the Camera app. Let's go and tap the three dots button there and name the shortcut Launch Camera. Now I'll tap Add to Home Screen. Now here I get to change the name that appears. So I'm going make it have the same name, Camera, and I'm going to tap on the icon there and instead of using one of the built-in shortcut icons I can choose a photo or a file. So let's choose a file. You could choose anything you happen to have locally or in iCloud Drive. I'll choose that icon there. Now I'll tap Add. Now when I switch back to the Home Screen you could see I've got that icon there. One big issue with this is that it doesn't launch cleanly. If you tap it it launches shortcut there for a second and then launches the app. But if you don't mind that you could stick all of your apps into an app folder and create these little shortcuts that link to the apps and launch them all that way. That way you could customize your Home Screen to look anyway you want. You can add the widgets. You could add the icons. You could go into Settings and then from there you can change your wallpaper and use whatever wallpaper you want. You really can make your Home Screens look completely unique and different than everybody else's. Another thing people are doing is using third party apps to create custom widgets since an app can create its own widget. Of course some apps now are there simply for this purpose. So one that's popular, for instance, is Widgetsmith. You can go into that and you can create widgets that do various things. So for instance here I can add a small widget. I can tap on that widget. I can customize it to show different things like the date and time in different ways. A different photo in my Photos Album. Different things for Calendar and Health and Weather and things like that. I can customize the fonts, the colors, the backgrounds and create these interesting widgets that can then go on my screen. So that's what a lot of people are doing to create highly customized looks for their Home Screens. So here I've created a widget that just shows the day of the week and the date. I can Save it. You can see it appears there. Now when I want to add that I can tap and hold, hit the Plus button there, then if I select Widgetsmith I can add a small widget because it was one of those. Add that and then tap it and you could see I've got Small #2, which is the one I created, and now I've got my customized widget there. You could just create as many of those as you want for various uses. I'm sure other app developers are going to come out with even more widgets that you could use to customize your Home Screen in the coming weeks.Related Subjects: iPhone (313 videos) Related Video Tutorials: 8 iPhone Home Screen Customization Tips ― Customize Toolbars On the iPad ― New in macOS 14.4
