iPad Tip: Organize Screens Using iTunes

May 6, 2010 by James Hicks in Apple with 2 Comments

If you’re getting frustrated having to manually rearrange apps on your iPad, you can use iTunes instead. This excerpt from Biersdorfer & Pogue’s iPad: The Missing Manual will walk you through the process.

If you want an easier way to fine-tune your iPad’s Home screens, iTunes lets you arrange all your app icons from your big-screen computer:

Connect the iPad to your computer. Click its icon in the Source list.
Click the Applications tab. You now see all your applications—a complete list on the left, a giant version of the current screen in the middle, and individual pages to the right-hand side of or below the Big Screen.
Select the icons you want to move. Click an icon you want to move on the JumboTron and drag it to the desired page thumbnail—iTunes re-creates both iPad screen orientations so you can fine-tune the look of your screens: Landscape mode pages appear along the bottom, Portrait mode screens stacked vertically on the far right. Hold down the Ctrl or c keys and click to select multiple apps. It’s much easier to group similar apps on a page this way—you can have, say, a page of games or a page of online newspapers. You can even swap out the four permanent application icons in the gray bar on the bottom of the iPad screen (either here or on the tablet itself) with other apps—and squeeze in two more for a total of six apps in the permanent row.
Click Apply or Sync. Wait just a moment as iTunes rearranges the icons on your iPad so they mirror the setup in iTunes.

But what if you have too many apps for the iPad’s limit of 11 Home screens? Even if an app’s not visible, you can find it on the tablet by flicking your finger from left to right on the first Home screen and typing in the app name in the search box that appears. [via]

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