Organizing iPhone icons

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Level 1

112 points

Organizing iPhone icons

I have a lot of applications on my iPhone. When they download there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason for where the icons appear on my phone. I want to organize the icons in some logical fashion so that I am not always flipping back and forth through the pages to find what I am looking for. Is there a way to organize how the icons appear on the different screens other than holding down an icon until it wiggles and then dragging it?

I have five full pages of icons and doing it that way is very, very cumbersome. Does anyone know how else you can do it?

15 inch MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 2.8-24" iMac; 2.4-24" iMac; 8G iPhone; MacBook Air; Apple TV; 13" MB; Mac Mini

Posted on Aug 16, 2008 11:25 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Allan Sampson

Level 10

123,677 points

Aug 16, 2008 11:34 AM in response to redxk8

Dragging an application's icon to your desired location is the only way - at the present time anyway.

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Answer 2

Aug 16, 2008 12:46 PM in response to redxk8

Redxk8 -- (wouldn't be a Jag driver, would you?)
Allan has it spot-on as usual. No other way exists today for moving icons than you described.

Also you are also probably aware of the effect updates have on applications. When you update an application from the AppStore on the phone, the icon will move to the first available open space and start updating. It will stay there after the update. This makes icon arrangement a little frustrating to some users.

Jailbroken (hacked)phones have many icon management tools and some are pretty clever. At this time, the tools Apple gave to the developers(in SDK) do not allow icon management beyond the one icon the app installs on the phone.

We can hope this will change in the future as people ask for more customization of their phones.

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Answer 3

Aug 18, 2008 4:27 AM in response to redxk8

Well you could try my solution, iCons. They are $2.50 and there are 19 of them. They are basically custom icons for each page and you save them to desktop from safari. From there you can put one at the top of the screen or in the middle and have those apps under them.

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Answer 4

cowbird

Level 1

8 points

Nov 10, 2008 10:55 AM in response to redxk8

I don't think that we should have to resort to buying an application to handle this or jailbreaking the phone. For a company that pays such specific attention to detail, you would think that Apple would have something somewhere for this.

It would be great if Apple could integrate this into iTunes somehow. Ideally, if they added an "Organize" tab under the Applications section under Library, the user could drag the icons around as they choose on a simulated iPhone screen. For users with a great deal of applications and websites on their screens, this would be a huge help.

I really hope that Apple listens to the users on this one, it would be a major step forward in the customization of the iPhone.

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Answer 5

Jan 4, 2009 6:20 AM in response to cowbird

suggest it to apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Personally I like the idea of a better ui on the apple for organizing apples into folders/categories and suggested that. Nifty to do it via itunes but also nifty to be able to select categories for a app or toss app's into folders on the fly imho.

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