One thing I love to do to pass the time when I’ve got nothing else going on is to look at other people’s home screens. I love me a good, well-thought-out home screen, and I’m always looking for ideas to improve mine.
Because I switched from Android to iOS a little over a year ago the customization options are a lot more limited in what you can do, but the limitations of iOS bring its own set of challenges for creating the perfect home screen. And while there are some new options arriving in the upcoming iOS release I don’t see myself taking advantage of most of them. The one thing I was really hoping they would add was the ability to change the size of the icon grid to 5×7 or maybe even 6×8, but sadly that didn’t happen. Please make this a thing, Apple. I have a phone with a giant screen, and I want to make use of it.
With all of that out of the way, here is the current state of my iOS home screen:
As always there are improvements I would like to make, which is why I was technically planning on writing this post months ago, but I’ve stuck with this set-up for quite a while now so I might as well just post it.
I’m running just a single screen and three icons in the dock (which is the correct amount). Apart from Drafts, Due, and OmniFocus, every other icon is a Shortcut launcher for a bunch of other apps or actions that I frequently use (idea and naming scheme stolen shamelessly from Tim Nahumck).
The widgets I’m running are probably the part of this that I’m the least happy with right now, but I have yet to take the time to find a solution that I like better. I’ll probably look into changing things around once the newest release of iOS is finally released, but for now, this is what I’m working with.
If you’re a home screen nerd like me, please send me a picture of yours, I’d love to take a look!