Chapter 6. Customizing the Home Screen
The Home screen displays icons that represent all the apps available on your iPad. Since you’ll be staring at the Home screen all the time, you may want to customize its appearance by rearranging icons on the screen, moving them off (or on) to additional panes, or just deleting certain apps altogether.
In addition, the Home screen lets you choose a background image as your wallpaper. You can choose one of the photographs that Apple provides or use any of your own pictures that you’ve loaded on your iPad. You can put a picture of your kids making silly faces on your iPad or use a picture of your dog or cat. The choice is yours.
In this chapter you’ll learn how to customize the Home screen of your iPad.
Rearranging Icons on the Home Screen
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.
Rearranging Icons on the iPad
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.
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 click and 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.
Rearranging Icons Through iTunes
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 6-1.
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.
Rearranging Icons into Folders
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 towards 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 6-2.
Renaming a Folder
When you create a folder, that folder displays the category of the first app icon you used to create a folder. While you may want to keep this default folder name, such as Games or Education, you’ll probably prefer to give your folders more descriptive names. To change a folder’s name, follow these steps:
Press your finger over any app icon. All the app icons start wriggling.
Tap the folder icon that you want to rename. The Name field and contents of that folder appears as shown in Figure 6-3.
Tap in the Name field to display the virtual keyboard.
Type a new name or edit the existing name. To delete the current folder name, tap the Clear icon at the far right of the Name field (it looks like a white X inside a gray circle).
Tap the Done key on the virtual keyboard to display the contents of the folder again.
Tap anywhere on the screen and press the Home button to stop all your app icons from wriggling.
Taking Icons out of a Folder
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 the app icons from wriggling.
Putting Apps on the Dock
At the bottom of the screen, your iPad initially displays four app icons (Safari, Mail, Photos, and iPod). This area acts like the Dock in Mac OS. It displays its apps at all times, even if you switch to a different Home screen pane. If you find yourself using certain apps all the time, you may want to place those apps on this Dock area so they will always be available. You can put up to six applications on the Dock.
Adding App Icons to the Dock
To add an app icon to the Dock, follow these steps:
At the Home screen, touch and hold the app icon that you want to move to the Dock. All your app icons start wriggling. You can release your finger.
Drag the app icon to the Dock and then lift your finger off the screen. Your app now appears on the Dock.
Press the Home button to stop all your app icons from wriggling.
Taking App Icons off the Dock
If you find that you don’t use certain apps on the Dock often enough to justify having this app icon appear all the time, you can always move them off the Dock by following these steps:
At the Home screen, touch the app icon that you want to move off the Dock until all your app icons start wriggling.
Drag the app icon off the Dock, move the app icon anywhere on the screen, and then lift your finger off the screen.
Press the Home button to stop all your app icons from wriggling.
Resetting Your Home Screen
Rearranging the icons on the Home screen can customize your iPad, but if you get carried away and wind up making a mess out of your icons, relax. At any time, you can revert your Home screen to its original factory settings. To reset the appearance of the Home screen, follow these steps:
From the Home screen, tap the Settings icon. The Settings screen appears.
Tap General. The General settings screen appears.
Scroll down the General settings screen until you see the Reset button.
Tap Reset. The Reset settings screen appears.
Tap Reset Home Screen Layout. A dialog appears, asking whether you really want to reset your Home screen, as shown in Figure 6-4.
Tap Reset (or tap Cancel).
Press the Home button. The Home screen appears. Notice that your Home screen has now returned to its original appearance.
Modifying the Wallpaper
The wallpaper image appears behind all your app icons so you have something interesting to look at rather than just a blank screen. To customize the appearance of your wallpaper, you can adjust the brightness or just choose a new image altogether.
Adjusting the Wallpaper Brightness
The wallpaper on your iPad is meant to provide an interesting image to look at, but if it seems too light or too dark, you can always modify this brightness by following these steps:
From the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings screen appears.
Tap Brightness & Wallpaper. The Brightness & Wallpaper settings screen appears, as shown in Figure 6-5.
Drag the Auto-Brightness slider left or right.
(Optional) Tap the Auto-Brightness on/off switch. When the Auto-Brightness switch reads ON, your iPad will adjust the brightness of the screen based on the surrounding lighting conditions.
Press the Home button. The Home screen appears.
Changing the Wallpaper
If you want to choose a different wallpaper image for your iPad, you can either pick one of the wallpaper images included with your iPad or use a picture that you’ve already transferred from your computer to your iPad. (Chapter 18 explains how to transfer pictures from your computer to your iPad.)
To change the wallpaper image, follow these steps:
From the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings screen appears.
Tap Brightness & Wallpaper. The Brightness & Wallpaper settings screen appears (see Figure 6-6).
Tap anywhere inside the curved rectangle under the Wallpaper group. The screen displays a Wallpaper button along with a list of photo albums currently stored in your Photos app.
Tap Wallpaper (to choose from an image included on your iPad), or tap a photo album that you’ve transferred from your computer to your iPad. Thumbnail images of your available pictures appear, as shown in Figure 6-7.
Tap the image you want to use as your wallpaper. Your iPad shows what your chosen image looks like and displays three buttons (Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, and Set Both) in the upper-right corner, as shown in Figure 6-8.
Tap Set Lock Screen, Set Lock Home Screen, or Set Both. (You can also tap Cancel if you change your mind.) Your chosen image now appears as the wallpaper on your Lock screen and/or your Home screen, depending on which option you chose in the previous step.
Press the Home button. The Home screen appears.
Additional Ideas for Customizing Your Home Screen
You’ll spend most of your time looking at your Home screen so you might as well customize it so you’ll enjoy looking at it. Group together your most commonly used apps on the Home screen, and set your favorite image as your wallpaper.
Since you can choose your own wallpaper images, put pictures of animals, landscapes, artwork, or people on your iPad. If you’re comfortable with creating graphic images and transferring them to your iPad, turn your daily or weekly to-do list into a graphic image and then make it your wallpaper. Every time you turn on your iPad, you’ll see your tasks and goals. By putting your own images on your iPad, you can truly customize its appearance so nobody will ever mistake your iPad for their own.