Ideas for iPhone Springboard 2.0
The iPhone OS has come quite a ways since 1.0. Besides the often mentioned Cut,Copy, & Paste, many other enhancements both “under the hood” and visual have been implemented. However one feature that has gone wholly unchanged is springboard. Ok, you can swipe far left to reveal spotlight searching. So what. Big whoop. That isn’t that big of an update. The kind of update I’m talking about is that of navigating apps and springboard itself. The uber simple individual icon/grid approach that made the iPhone famous a couple short years ago is already wearing thing. With Apple pushing apps and encouraging people to hoard these digital time wasters, having a place to put them and then quickly an easily find them is becoming increasingly difficult with the current Springboard.
However, a few clever ideas by “Tog” have give hope that even if his ideas don’t make their way to iPhone 4.0 and beyond, hopefully Apple is at least watching. My personal favorite of Tog’s ideas is that of a vertical scrolling Springboard (pictured above) in addition to the normal horizontal. Giving your screen the extra space would be whole beneficial, though, with a non-moving dock I can see how this doesn’t quite have that Apple-esque flow. Still, the concept is intriguing and one worth looking more in to no?
Of course, if you simply give in to the jailbreak, countless innovative and revolutionary ways of organizing iPhone apps and navigating the Springboard have been conceived and released. Desktop variants of stacks, category based organization methods, and simple app launchers that give you the ability to hide icons have all given jailbroken iPhone’s the ability to continue the innovation on a front where Apple has stalled.
Stop by Tog’s article and give it a good look over. Then, if you aren’t familiar, spend a few minutes on Google looking at the iPhone version of stacks as well as several other navigation tweaks for jailbroken iPhones. Afterwards, comeback and pipe in a word or two on what you feel would work best. Heck, reveal some even more innovative navigation/organization method that we haven’t seen yet. Let your minds run…
While the dock is a love it or hate it feature in OS X, most people who enjoy the dock’s company also in some form enjoy stacks. The expanding folders that reside on the dock make it easy and quick to see inside a particular folder. Until now, Windows users have had to suffice with….nothing (please correct if I’m wrong). However, your patience has paid off as Windows 7 will finally bring with it a nifty 3rd party app called “7Stacks”.
