Use iTunes to Manage iPhone App Icons

To date, I have downloaded 150 different apps for my iPhone. Most of them were free. Some were: "That could be cool, for $1 I'll try it." Of those, only 40 or so are still on my phone.

Even so, thats a bunch of icons to manage by dragging them around on the phone.

Apple came to the rescue with iTunes 9. They have made big improvements to the sync engine in iTunes, and one of those improvements is the ability to control where your icons are on your phone.

(Note: In order to use this, you have to upgrade to iPhone OS 3.1. This breaks the tethering hack I've been using, but hopefully ATT will enable that soon.)

While it is helpful, it is distinctly un-Apple. You can have up to 9 screens of apps on your phone. But the iTunes manager only lets you see 3 of them at a time. If you want to drag an icon to the others you have to scroll.

The scroll window is vertical, so space is limited. Of course, I have a 24" display, so I have space, but regardless of how big I size the iTunes window, I don't get more than 3 iPhone pages.

If the scroll window were, I don't know, say Horizontal (since most displays are wide screen these days) you'd have plenty of room for all 9 possible iPhone pages.

Also, when you drag an icon, sometimes the main display changes to that page and sometimes it doesn't.

Here's the process:

• Scroll to the correct screen where the icon currently is located.
• Click the icon.
• Scroll to the correct screen where you want the icon to go.
• Drag and drop the icon.
• Scroll back to the previous screen and get the next icon.

Apple could have done much better. It feels like the way Microsoft would have done it.