You might find yourself using the Calendar and iPod apps every day but rarely using the Contacts or Notes apps. To make it easy to access the Calendar and iPod apps, you might want to put these icons in the corner of the screen and bury seldom-used app icons in another pane that’s hidden out of sight. There are two ways to rearrange your Home screen: directly on the iPad or through iTunes on your computer.
The fastest way to rearrange icons on your Home screen is to manipulate and move those icons directly on your iPad. To rearrange icons on the Home screen, follow these steps:
Press the Home button. The Home screen appears. (Skip this step if the Home screen is already visible.)
Press and hold your finger on the icon that you want to move to a new location until all the icons on the Home screen start wriggling, as shown in Figure 6-1.
Drag the icon to where you want to move it. When you move an icon in between two other icons, those two icons glide out of the way. You can now drag any app to a new location.
(Optional) Tap the close button of any app icon that you want to remove from your iPad. It’s the little X in the upper left.
Press the Home button to stop all the Home screen icons from wriggling.
If you have a lot of apps stored on your iPad or want to move app icons from one pane to another, it’s much faster to do it through iTunes instead. Not only can you use your mouse (or laptop trackpad) to move icons across multiple panes faster than you could do this on your iPad, but you can also see thumbnail images of each Home screen pane, which makes it easier to see the arrangement of all your app icons at once. To rearrange icons on the Home screen through iTunes, follow these steps:
Connect your iPad to your computer through the USB cable.
Run iTunes on your Mac or PC.
Click the name of your iPad under the Devices category in the iTunes window.
Click the Apps tab and make sure a check mark appears in the Sync Apps check box. The right side of the screen displays your Home screen panes, as shown in Figure 6-2.
Drag any app icons to a new location using the mouse.
(Optional) Using the mouse, point to any app icon that you want to delete. A close button appears in the upper-left corner of that app. Click this close button to remove the app from your iPad.
Click Apply. Wait until iTunes finishes syncing your iPad before disconnecting it from the USB cable.
One problem with storing too many apps on your iPad is that your screen can soon look cluttered with so many app icons all over the place. To fix this problem, you can organize multiple apps into folders. To create a folder, follow these steps:
Press your finger over any app icon that you want to store in a folder. All the app icons start wriggling.
Drag the app icon toward a second app icon that you want to store in the same folder. A dark border appears around this second app icon.
Drag the app icon over this app icon with the dark border around it. After you lift your finger from the screen, the contents of your folder appear on the screen, allowing you to drop your currently selected icon into the folder, as shown in Figure 6-3.
Press the Home button.
(Optional) If you want to change the name of your folder later, just tap and hold an icon until they wiggle. Tap the folder you wish to rename, tap the title, and use the virtual keyboard to type a new folder name. Press the Home button when you’re done typing.
After you have created a folder that contains two or more app icons, you can always take an app icon out of a folder and place it back on the desktop. To remove an icon from a folder, follow these steps:
Tap the folder icon that you want to modify. The contents of the folder appear underneath the folder icon (see Figure 6-3).
Press your finger over the app icon that you want to move out of the folder. The app icons start wriggling.
Drag the icon out of the folder and on to the desktop.
Press the Home button to stop all your app icons from wriggling.