Yesterday Apple released iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1, and this new version of iTunes addresses one of my biggest few frustrations with the iPhone: organizing your apps.
I cringe at saying “apps,” fearing I sound like Michael Scott talking about something they sell at Dave & Busters. But, given that it’s known as the App Store, I guess that’s what to call them.
Anyway… this is not about what they’re called, it’s about how they’re organized. And up to now, the only way to organize them was to go to your iPhone’s home screen, hold your finger on an icon until they all start to wiggle, and then drag them around. Not bad, when you only have one screen’s worth of apps, or even two or three. But I have seven — and that doesn’t even count the apps I downloaded but deleted from my iPhone.
Trying to keep seven screens’ worth of icons (16 per screen) organized by this finger-dragging method is tedious to say the least. And now that even the default configuration includes two screens, Apple realized they had to do something about it.
But now, we have this:
Brilliant. I love it. The only flaw now is that this layout is too big to fit into the iTunes interface on my MacBook without having to scroll the entire thing, since the iPhone screen is represented at actual-pixel size. (I had to take two screenshots and stitch them together in Photoshop to create the image you see above, which is scaled down slightly from the actual size.
Then again, it’s always something, isn’t it?