A Quick Look At The iPhone App Manager In iTunes 9

Giles Turnbull ()

Here’s a short screencast showing the basic function of iTunes 9’s new app management tool for iPhone and iPod touch.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast this with this app manager concept that we featured here on the Cult back in February.

Most iPhone owners I know have never bothered to sort their apps into any sort of meaningful screen-by-screen arrangement, simply because doing so was too much hassle. This tool will change that, I think, and encourage people to create screenfuls of apps sorted by category.

DON'T MISS
Opinion: Arranging Your iPhone Apps Is A Waste Of Time

Have you tried re-arranging your apps yet? What do you make of it?

12 comments »

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in iPhone, iTunes, News, Software |

  • Ronk

    Hey, I’m on of the very few people who actually religious sorted out their apps before this handy feature came out… and while doing so I constantly wished for this EXACT feature to be released. This has made my life so much better already… I’m a freshman in college and finally got in to social networking and, as a result, download a ton of social networking apps. I was about to go through and painstakingly sift through them when I noticed this feature and I just about cried. THANK YOU APPLE!

  • Teresa

    Thank you for the video. I could not figure out how to use the app organizer function. My apps are a mess!

  • Dustin Moskowitz

    Been playing with the app manager for a little bit. It’s better than moving apps around on the phone itself, as you can go right from one page to another, but it’s still cumbersome. You can only view one page at a time in a size comparable to the phone, but the little thumbnails along the right could stand to be a bit bigger. I think what would be much better would be the ability to just open up as many windows as you want (outside iTunes if needed), and then pull your apps into each window, possibly from a dock-like trough where all the apps are. Seeing all windows/screens at one would be worlds better than working through them one at a time. Also, to just add a new blank screen would be helpful; I think the only way to do it is to add more apps to the last screen than it can fit, and then it creates a new window when it pushes the last app into it. Improvement, but not perfect.

  • http://www.AgnewStudios.com Stephen Agnew

    Any app organization without the ability of creating folders is utterly useless. What a waste.

  • pdxMelinda

    Ditto Dustin and Ronk… I won’t repeat excellent points but what I hope is gone is that when you downloaded new apps, they started loading from the first screen, messing with the order… guess I should have watched the video to see if you can direct the downloads, as well as organize post-facto. Doesn’t everyone organize their iPhone? tee-hee

  • Shawn Pero

    The App Manager doesn’t work if you either have a jailbroken iPhone, or aren’t running 3.1 – I don’t know which yet.

  • Jongleur

    “The App Manager doesn’t work if you either have a jailbroken iPhone, or aren’t running 3.1 – I don’t know which yet. – Shawn Pero”

    My guess would be not running 3.1. I’m sure the iPhone and iTunes need to be reading from the same page to arrange the app icons.

    My concern is that I have 5 apps in the dock.

  • http://twitter.com/wisher86 mario

    I don’t think that moving the application directly on the iPhone/iPodTouch is too complex to require a iTunes feature to do that.

  • Teresa

    Joneleur, thanks for noting that about 3.1. Couldn’t figure out why my Applications page didn’t look like the one in the video.

  • Sean Peters

    I’m one of the anal-retentive types who have been doing this manually, and I do think this organizing capability will help… but, the whole concept of app screens is still a little kludgy. When I’m on the home screen, and I want an app that’s not on the home screen, I end up having to page through all the screens, one at a time, until I get to the one I want. And if I can’t remember exactly which screen contains the app of interest, then I also get to spend time looking at each screen to figure out if this is it. Not the biggest deal in the world, but still kind of a pain. Why can’t we have labelled tabs, or a dropdown list, or something that would take me right to the screen I want?

  • Samuel

    @Sean Peters: it’s Apple man, they’ll never let you have your way. They know what’s best for you.
    And even when it seems like they given in to your needs, it’s not, because the take away [your freedoms] on the other side of app ;)))

    Better let go, you’ll never measure up to Apple/SJ’s anal-retentiveness ;)))

  • Michael

    So close, but … Managing large numbers of apps needs more automated tools … especially: sort (and place) by frequency of app use, user defined categories, and page placement rules. Otherwise, app manager remains another video game. Assume (hopefully) it will improve with time.