Motion is a new jailbreak utility available in Cydia that makes your iPhone homescreen just a bit more interesting. While Motion may not add a ton of functionality to your device, it’s a fun tweak to play around with and show off to your friends. It basically adds transitions and effects to the movement to all of the icons on your springboard.

Motion is a tweak that makes your icons move. There are a whole bunch of settings you can use to liven up your home screen and make your icons dance around.

• Rotate: Make your icons rotate
• Scaling: Make your icons grow
• Skew: Make your icons tilt sideways
• Jump: Make your icons jump
• Transparency: Make your icons fade in and out
• Waves: Make your icons move in waves (vertical and horizontal)

You can use these settings alone, or in combinations.

Motion is already available in the Cydia store and will run on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 4.x or higher. If you’re looking for even more tweaks and utilities to install, check out our guide to the best jailbreak applications for iOS 5.

• $1.00 — Cydia Store Link

More jailbreak resources:

• How to jailbreak guides
• Jailbreak apps, hacks, and themes
• General jailbreak and unlock help forums

New to iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and curious how to set up a new ringtone, change a wallpaper, or arrange your app icons and folders, and otherwise personalize it and make it your own? Luckily these tasks can be completed quite simply, so let’s take a look at how they are done.

• How to change your wallpaper
• How to set a ringtone
• How to move icons
• How to create a folder

While this only covers some of the basics, it gives you a way to personalize your device and begin the process of making it your very own. Be sure to hop into the forums and show off your Home screen as well!

What apps have earned a coveted spot on your main iPhone 4S home screen? Is it still default, just as Apple shipped it? Or have you moved everything around just so, including the dock icons?

Do you organize by function or type of app, or by aesthetics and icon color? Do you allow folders on your home screen or folders in your dock? Do you hide away any built-in apps like Stocks? Do you put your most used apps on the edges or in the center?

Take a screen shot and attach it in our official iPhone 4S home screen forum thread, and let us know why you made the choices you did — we’re always looking for good tips!

Thanks Static_FX for sharing your home screen!

3DBoard uses the iPhones accelerometer and gyroscope to present a “3D” view of the Springboard/Home Screen icons and it looks pretty nifty. Sure it’s pure eye candy and not as functional a tweak as SBSettings or LockInfo, but cool has to count for something, right?

It’s coming to Cydia soon and will cost $4. Anyone going to grab it?

Video after the break!

[YouTube via Gizmodo]

Just get a new iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad an curious how to rearrange your app icons and put your favorite programs exactly where you want them for faster, easier access? Maybe you want Facebook right up front and that default stock app to get lost? It’s easy to do and we’ll show you how, after the break.

• From the iPhone or iPad home screen, touch and hold any icon until all of the icons start to jiggle (this is called “jiggly mode”)
• Once they’re jiggling, just touch an hold an icon and then move it around the page until it’s exactly where you want it.
• If you drag an icon to the extreme left or right of your home screen, almost off the edge, you’ll scroll to the previous or next page and be able to place the icon on a new or different home screen.
• You can even drag apps out of the dock that you might not use that often and put more frequently used apps in the dock (like replacing iPod with Messages for frequent SMSers).
• If you drag an icon on top of another icon, you’ll start a new folder. You can put up to 12 apps in an iPhone folder and 20 apps in iPad folder. (And yes, you can put folders in the dock as well!)
• If you tap the X on top of a jiggling icon, you’ll delete it so make sure you don’t do that unless you really want to!
• Once you’re done, click the home button to exit jiggly mode.

Bonus tip: If you want to rearrange a lot of icons all at once it can be a lot faster to plug your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad into your Mac or Windows PC and do the heavy lifting in iTunes. Then, when the virtual screen in iTunes is just the way you want it, click to sync and all the changes will be carrier over.

Bonus Jailbreak tip: If you are jailbroken you can use Gridlock to leave blank spaces and otherwise more precisely place your icons.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. If you’ve already rearranged your iPhone or iPad apps and found something that really works well for you, let us know!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

Gridlock is an iPhone Jailbreak hack that will allow you to setup app icons on your home screen in a manner that doesn’t interfere with your wallpaper or just let you create an awesome pattern — the choice is yours. It is easy to use, all you have to do is hold down on an icon to make your apps jiggle like you always do and then move them around anywhere you want.

That’s it, no app, no settings, just click and drag your icons anywhere! Best of all it’s just $0.99 in Cydia, thanks Chronic Dev-Team member chpwn!

by Brian

On the iPad, when you change orientation from landscape to portrait mode, only 8 of your app icons out of 20 stay in relatively the same place — the 4 top, leftmost icons and the 4 bottom, rightmost icons. That means 12 of the icons — more than half — change positions, and 5 of them change rows completely.

iPhone has never done landscape mode home screens, but even if it did its 4×4 icon grid would stay the same no matter which orientation it was in. iPad’s grid, however, is 4×5 in portrait and 5×4 in landscape. It’s a rectangle not a square.

On one of the first episodes of the iPad live! podcast, I mentioned how this seemed to create extra mental work when looking for an app. Their position no longer being reliable and dependable, I found myself looking for them rather than just tapping them on instinct, especially the apps that wrapped to a new row when orientation changed.

Consistency is a huge part of iOS’ success. UI elements in the same place tend to do the same thing. One built-in app tends to work the way other built-in apps work. And up until iPad, app icons were always in the same place on an iOS home screen.

This might seem like a minor detail, but Apple’s always been a company that sweats the minor details, that almost always nails them. Steve Jobs said people don’t always notice design, but they notice when it’s missing.

I notice when my icons are “missing” or not in the same place just because I’m not in the same orientation.

Since I don’t have a better solution in mind, however, and enjoy having 20 icons per screen, what I’ve started doing is placing icons I use most in those 8 relatively static positions so I know they’re always top left or top right no matter what orientation I’m in. That’s consistent enough that I can hit them without thinking about it.

If you’ve got any better tips, let me know in comments.

Yesterday’s iPhone 4.0 sneak preview event gave us 7 new “tent-pole” features, 1500 new APIs for developers, and once again took Apple’s mobile OS a step closer to feature parity and a step further towards elegant functionality… but we didn’t get everything we wanted. And no matter how hard we tried, we found we didn’t even get everything we needed. In other words, iPhone 4.0 is still missing out in some key areas. Even though we got some good stuff, this is what we didn’t get:

• No new Home Screen/SpringBoard. We understand that Apple has 85,000,000 legacy users now trained on the iPhone Home Screen system (aka the same app launcher metaphor going back to the days of PalmOS). We knew when Apple said as much during the iPad announcements that they weren’t going to confuse that “already trained” customer base. It’s the price of being an established OS, after all. So Apple didn’t radically re-invent the Home Screen. They did make it layered — it can lift up to show you multitasking apps and slit open to show you apps inside folders — but that’s it. And part of “that’s it” means…

• No themes. You get wallpaper and that’s where your customization ends. You still can’t remove built-in apps (though you can hide them in a folder so they take less space). You can’t chance the look of icons. There’s no animated backgrounds to be had. More disappointingly, however…

• No widgets. Want to know the latest weather, Facebook or Twitter updates, or stick a big clock on the screen? There’s an app for all of that, sure, but you have to go into and out of each individual app and the Home Page remains a giant grid of uninformative icons. Android and Nokia have had widgets for a while now, webOS lets you flick between live Cards, and Windows Phone 7 will have live tiles. iPhone… will be waiting on 5.0? More’s the pity too because…

• No new notification system. We got local notifications, so there’s some measure of offline alerts, but they’re trapped in the same single, modal, popup hell that’s existed since iPhone 3.0. (And it’s particularly ludicrous on the iPad!). Again, still, if you get a couple SMS, a few Twitter DMs, a game challenge or two, and calendar reminder, and then an IM, you’ll only ever know that IM existed — everything else is completely and utterly destroyed in terms of notifications, and while some apps will badge with a number for unread items, you have to go find them and that’s “pull”, not “push”. Maybe this is also a 5.0 feature…

A lot of other stuff failed to put in an appearance as well.

• Apps can now embed SMS, but why isn’t that a system-wide, OS level, quick-reply API included in the alerts?
• Calendar still has no week view. iPad calendar rotates to landscape, why can’t iPhone?
• Photos gets Faces and Places, but no MobileMe or other syncing abilities. It’s 2010, isn’t it?
• Weather is still 1.0. Even stocks has been updated. Compared to HTC’s weather, it’s in the dust.
• Settings are still bound to an app. You can’t tap the title bar to quickly toggle Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or any of a half-dozen other useful things.
• Mail gets universal inbox, threaded messages, and fast switching, but still no IMAP IDLE (at least GoogleSync can now be used alongside ActiveSync, but still…)
• Safari still lacks Flash, Java, or any other plugin and likely always will. But it should really have gotten in-page text string search.
• iPad gets orientation lock via a hardware switch where the iPhone’s mute switch is located. How about at least a software gesture?
• What about a universal “back” gesture while we’re at it as well? Tapping the title bar auto-scrolls a list to top, couldn’t swiping from right to left take us back to the previous screen, in every app?

iPhone 4.0 was full of functional goodness, no doubt about it. Perhaps we’ll even see one or two more come WWDC in June (Mobile iChat video?) Even given Apple’s size, there are limitations of time and resources that mean they have to choose what features get done now and what get left for later. You can’t have everything immediately. Did doing multitasking come at the expense of doing notifications this time around? (or did iAd?) Maybe. But that’s for Apple to decide and for us, the users, to take them to task over.

And, oh yeah, there’s still no built in task app (or sync).

Anything else missing from iPhone 4.0 that really ought to have been in there?

Tomorrow at 10am PT, 1pm ET, Steve Jobs puts sneaker to stage and, along with SVP of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, gives us a sneak preview of the highly anticipated iPhone 4.0. No one outside Apple knows exactly what new features and paradigms iPhone 4.0 will offer. However, tradition demands we make our best guesses and ask you to do the same.

This isn’t what we want, mind you. We told Apple what we want back on December 25, 2009: multitasking, better notifications, widgets for the home screen, instant access to important settings, themes, gestures like pervasive pull-down-to-refresh, system-wide “back” implementation, orientation lock, and resolution independence, along with a ton of great reader suggestions in the comments. We’ve also asked for a Finder app, like the Photo but to store document files.

This is what we think we’ll actually get, given the rumors and the direction Apple looks to be going. This is us, TiPb staff and TiPb readers reading the tea leaves…

iPhone 3.2 (aka iPad) features

This is the most obvious, really (and we’ve written about it before). All the little tweaks and enhancements Apple has made to the underlying OS, like adding “replace” to cut, copy, and paste, adding spell check to auto-correct, adding dictionary lookup to text select, etc. Wallpaper for the Home Screen, week view in Calendar and the other, sometimes small but still important, chance to the built-in apps, should be there as well. So should Bluetooth keyboard support. Oh, and iBooks.

Better Mail handling

Steve Jobs himself reportedly responded to an email saying a “universal inbox” was coming. That means, like Mac Mail but unlike current iPhone Mail, users with multiple accounts would have the option of seeing all their new messages in one place and not have to tap into and out of multiple folders every time they wanted to check every new message in every account. (Yes that sentence was crafted to feel as laborious as the current process!). Whether we’ll see more than that — IMAP IDLE, multiple exchange accounts, “synergy”-like messaging integration, etc. is unknown.

Multitasking (of a sort)

We’ve been hearing this for a while now — that Apple will offer some level of multitasking in iPhone 4.0. We’ve even seen it in the shadows. The three use-cases that it could cover are background tasks (listening to streaming internet radio while you browse Safari, keeping navigation running while you check Mail), fast task switching (going from Notes to Contacts and back), and multi-window workflow (dragging data from one application space into another).

While the “Pandora” model could easily be handled by allowing streaming accounts to be entered inside iPod (which already has background access going back to iPhone 1.0), the navigation model won’t be solved unless there’s a more universal background implementation. However, Apple has always put stability and mainstream user friendliness ahead of power-user functionality. A compromise seems most like — full background access for a highly limited number of applications.

Fast task switching was accomplished in large part by the speed of iPhone 3GS. What remains missing is the consistent saving of state by apps on exit (if you leave a twitter client or a race game and then go back it should be at exactly the place you left it), and a more elegant way to quickly move between apps — swiping between two apps 11 screens apart isn’t very Apple. The rumor here is for a Mac OS X-style Exposé implementation where a double-click of the Home Button would cause the current screen to fly out and a grid of active (background) apps to fly in. That sounds much more Apple.

Multi-window drag-and-drop may not be obvious given the small size of the iPhone, but given how Palm’s webOS Cards view presents apps — and how the iPhone Safari Pages view does likewise — is remains a tease. Still, we don’t expect it. Not yet.

New home screen (SpringBoard)

SpringBoard is the internal name of Apple’s Home Screen UI, which right now consists of an 11 page-wide application launcher grid with SpotLight search bolted on to the right. Rumors have persisted since before iPhone 3.0 that Apple has a new SpringBoard experience waiting in the wings. Again, there are several elements that could be at play: better organization, glance-able information, themes.

We’re not wishing here, so no grandiose “Apple will re-invent the metaphor for home screens with some ingenious new approach”. We’re looking at what Apple has already done for clues as to where they’re going. Stacks, then, where groups of similar apps are combined together until a tap expands them into a grid-launcher would be reasonable. Likewise, Dashboard where useful, glance-able information is always just a tap (or swipe) away. Dashboard could even integrate SpotLight, allowing it to replace a singletasker with a multitasker (how fitting). It could function similarly on the Lock Screen, for ultimate glance-ability.

We don’t see themes, however. Though they’d be a boon to users and designers/developers alike, they don’t seem very Apple (beyond the home screen wallpaper already mentioned).

Improved notification handling

We’ve beaten this one to death — if you get a constant stream of SMS, IM, game challenges, or any heavy amount of notifications each new one obliterates the one before meaning all but the most recent functionally never existed and hence never notified you of anything. Both Android and Palm webOS do this more functionally, though developers have complained to us that it may be too complex for the mainstream market Apple is targeting (too much management for mom). Could Apple create a more robust yet still drop-dead-simple notification system for the iPhone? Sure, and given how fast and far push notification has been adopted, we think it’s likely they will.

The simplest solution would be a Notification app (please, no smiley face logo) that listed all new notifications. When you’ve received multiple notifications, the dialog would show the most recent but also inform you of how many others you’ve missed, and an option to “see all” would be presented.

But that would likely make no one happy. This more than multitasking might be the most difficult nut to crack, and may end up being part of that new Home Screen mentioned above. That’s closer to guess work than we’re comfortable with for this post, however, so we’ll just leave it there for now.

iAd platform

“iAd” was rumored to be shown off on April 7, and April 8 is just a day later. Apple’s mobile advertising platform could certainly be part of the iPhone 4.0 SDK feature set unveiled for developers. Gossip says Steve Jobs wants to do for mobile advertising what iTunes did for digital music — make it not suck. We certainly hope so. Punch-the-monkey with push notifications is certainly not the new Home Screen experience we want.

iTunes.com

It’s fairly certain iTunes is moving to the cloud and becoming something akin to iTunes.com. We’d love to see streaming video from Apple, MobileMe “whispersync” to keep our place between iPhone and iPad, and other great, media-centric features. But Apple typically saves those for September to coincide with the new iPod touch and lately, new iTunes releases.

###Mobile iChat

We put this here just for Chad. We still think Mobile iChat (text and audio/video) is coming but not until the 4th generation iPhone is revealed at WWDC 2010. Apple usually holds a few new OS features back to show off the new hardware (like Compass, VoiceControl, etc. last year). Patience, Chad!

MobileMe 2.0

Beyond “whispersync” MobileMe has fallen so far behind Google services, DropBox and others that Apple really has to up its game here. Photo sync, cloud backup, and other features have gone from nice-to-have to must-have. Again, however, that feels more like a WWDC 2010 Phil Schiller announcement to us.

One more thing…?

That’s what we think is most likely to come with iPhone 4.0 tomorrow, but Apple has shown they can always surprise us (who expected the long, long list of previously missing features rattled off at the iPhone 3.0 event?). What are you expecting to see?

The Apple patents keep on rolling out and today the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office accepted Apple’s filing for a patent that would allow for contact icons to be placed on the home screen, along with the ability to invoke apps, retrieve and display contacts information, or dynamically display related information all tied to an individual contact.

“The icon can also be used to invoke one or more applications that are personalized to the contact. The icon can be modified to display information related to the contact. In one aspect, an icon associated with an entity can be temporarily displayed on the mobile device based on the proximity of the mobile device to the entity.”

This is pure speculation on our part but it’s possible you will see this patent come to life in the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0. Hopefully when January 27th comes we all will see what is in store for the future of the iPhone OS.

Now please excuse me while I go add a few more contacts on the home screen of my Moto Droid, since it’s been doing that for a while.

One more screen shot after the break!

[Via Redmond Pie]

Ocean Observations brings us a couple concepts on how they’d improve the iPhone Home Screen (Springboard). The first, above, embeds a tiny CoverFlow for apps at the bottom of the screen. While interesting, since Springboard currently supports only portrait mode and icon view, as TiPb’s asked for before, why not let it rotate to landscape for full-screen coverflow?

Next video concept, and another idea from Tog after the break!

Expose is awesome on the Mac, especially in Snow Leopard, but do we want it on our iPhone? The above proof-of-concept video offers a take on how it could look and work. Unfortunately, at that small size, are the tiny Home Screens discoverable? Would it work better if, instead of the Home Screens, it was a set of user-enabled background apps that were shown via Expose?

For both, holding down the Home button to launch would, of course, require giving up the current Voice Control activation, unless more complex controls like tap, tap, hold were introduced and weren’t too user hostile.

Meanwhile, Human Interface Guideline legend Tog offers his own opinion on what the iPhone home page system (called Springboard) needs to do to handle 180+ apps. His suggestions, pictured above, include labeled pages, vertical as well as horizontal scrolling, user-controlled icon positioning (i.e. the ability to leave empty slots), the ability to rename apps, containers (folders), aliases (so you can have the same app in multiple containers), and tags (which he says Apple is already working on).

Take a look at the video and check out Tog’s post, and let us know what you think.

[Via MobileCrunch and Daring Fireball, thanks Matthew for the tip!]

My home screen is incredibly boring. Because I have a few devices, and I do a lot of testing with them, I also have to restore them fairly often and it’s gotten to the point where I just leave everything in its default location because it’s a) easier than rearranging and b) I don’t have to hunt for stuff I haven’t rearranged.

So, my second screen has become where I move my non-default, but still more often used apps. Typically the exact order will vary due to the reasons above, but the apps are fairly consistent.

I’ll list out what I use after the break, but we’re really more interested in what’s on YOUR iPhone home screen and why. If you’re willing to share a screenshot, jump on over to our TiPb iPhone Forums, attach it, and share the details!

My screen: Top row is secondary Apple apps, which I use once-and-a-while but like to refer back to.

Next is UDID so I can quickly get an Ad Hoc distro set up if I need to test something. 1Password is typically the first thing that goes onto my Macs and iPhones. Life. Saver. BeeJiveIM is for those rare occasions I keep IM on, on the go. Qik is the Ad Hoc version that actually does stream live (Apple/AT&T need to approve that version now).

TWiT.am is for when I want to listen to streaming Leo Laporte. Wikipanion gets hit often for pop culture reference. Jaadu hasn’t been set up in a while, but I dream of it working for remote desktop one day. Skype just came to Canada, but only works on full bar WiFi right now.

TwitBit 2.0 is what I’m testing for Twitter right now. Tweetie is just so Apple-like I often default back to it for power posting. Shazam is Shazam. It might get banished to a lower screen soon. Navigon keeps me from getting lost, which I am wont to do.

Daynah from PHP-Princess.net just couldn’t abide the meager 11 pages and paltry 180 apps provided by iPhone 3.0, so she went about forcing Apple’s SpringBoard home screen manager to give her more. How did she do it?

Check the link above for the details, but the but gist is filling up more than the default 11 pages (additional apps will still be hidden), then moving built-in apps to the last spot, then moving in an additional icon to force a built-in app off the 11th screen, the downloading an app to fill in the empty spot, and… presto — 12th page.

Ninja level work-around to be sure, but if you can’t live with 180 visible apps, and decide to experiment, let us know your results!

Two fun little hacks for your iPhone this morning. The first comes from Nate True (aka iPhone genius), it’s a neat little way to get speed dial icons on your Home Screen. The trick? 1.1.3 allows you to add web shortcuts to the home screen and Safari allows web pages to initiate calls (with your permisison). Two great tastes that taste great together. True tells you how:

So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but I know many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen.

I’ve put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There’s no jailbreaking required for this one – it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation. –

The next dialing hack is for those of you with jailbroken iPhones. This is actually one of the better apps I’ve seen for this gray market – real Voice Dialing on your iPhone. It’s done up by Makayama and it’s $27.95. You’ll need to add them as a source yourself:

To get a free tryout, start Installer on your iPhone, press Sources, then Edit, then Add. Next, type http://tinyurl.com/2t8cax

…It might seem a little crazy to be paying for an iPhone app when the SDK is just around the corner, though. Nate True himself makes it clear that 1.1.3 takes more steps toward safely-installed apps by reducing the number of programs that run as “root.” But if you’re jonesing for voice dial and have money to burn, you have that option now.