Rearrange To Suit
Aug 23, 11:47 PMPhone, Email, Safari, iPod. This familiar pattern, seen on the bottom of every stock iPhone home screen, every promo shot, is practically synonymous with the iPhone. It’s the whole iPhone message — Phone, iPod, Internet Communicator — wrapped into four little icons.
The bottom row of icons on the iPhone home screen is the only constant one. You can have up to nine screens of WebClip and Application icons on your iPhone, but that anchor row is always there, always available. As such, it’s the most valuable screen space you have. Any icon that goes there is automatically more important because they’re present on each home screen. There are other key spots — the upper corners, for instance — but the anchor row is unique in this ability.
Given the Phone, iPod, Internet Communicator message, there shouldn’t be a whole lot of question about why Apple placed the four icons there. They’re the core functions of the device, and people stick with them for good reasons.
But maybe, just maybe, you should consider changing them around. Just a little.
I resisted doing this for a long time. There’s a strange psychological stubbornness to changing defaults, both due to the number of other people who use them and the effort involved in inventing new settings. Even though I knew that I used the iPhone Camera more than the iPod, I never switched them out. I just dealt with it. Optimizing a few seconds of workflow — even knowing that it would save a lot of time in the long run — wasn’t enough reason to modify the anchor row.
No, it took something much stronger to do that: namely, my intense dislike of push email.
I don’t like push email. Specifically, I hate the interruptions generated by it. So while I was perfectly happy with Mail sitting on the bottom row, quietly polling every hour or so, occasionally chirping at me that I had a new message, this new barrage of beeping and buzzing was awful. I started flinching whenever my iPhone made a noise. Even turning off Push didn’t help, because I’d come to associate that damn beep with an interruption. Classical conditioning at its best.
I did the only think you can do in that situation. I turned off all the email and calendar alerts, all the noises, all the notifications. I dragged Mail off the bottom row to sit next to Calendar up on the first screen, and immediately felt better.
But then I looked at the empty space on the anchor row and wondered, well, what goes in there?
A few minutes later, iPod was out, Camera was in, and the fourth slot saw a flurry of candidates — Contacts, Weather Underground, even Hahlo — but finally I settled on Google Mobile, since its search includes both the web and the iPhone.
And while this simple change hasn’t made me fall back in love with my iPhone — 2.0 has a lot to atone for — it’s certainly made it a little nicer, a little easier.
Renegotiate your defaults. Rearrange your environment to suit your needs, not everyone else’s.
I only wish I’d done it sooner.
