My Android home-screens. (Click for a larger image).
Since I developed my first live wallpaper for Android I’ve been interested in how people organize their home-screens. With the measure of flexibility that Android provides for customizing the stock home application, I couldn’t imagine adopting a different type of phone unless it offered a similar degree of control; it’s an essential part of the phone’s usability.
Some comments about my layout:
I keep a consistent horizontal band clear across all screens, this is a safe zone where I can slide the screen comfortably. I can hesitate, jab, and scud and not worry about launching an application.
Each screen has a different background colour. This means that I can identify which screen is which preattentively. The backgrounds transition smoothly between the colours, so the appearance is much less jarring than the screenshots suggest.
The central screen is always available, in any situation by pressing the “Home” button twice, so the things I do most often are represented here, together with actions that I need to be able to do urgently. So at the top I have a search bar, underneath I have the people I contact most frequently (this row used to include an icon for the browser until it became integrated into the home app, hence the gap), and at the bottom applications that I usually need in a hurry. The screens either side of the central home-screen are still fast to get to and contain the bulk of my remaining shortcuts and widgets.
The left-of-center screen contains folders for the types application I use most often. They are Media (music, pictures, video and streaming radio), Comms (includes email, messaging and blogging), Games (typically puzzles) and Develop (applications that I’m developing or that assist development). The bottom of this screen used to contain bookmarks, but I found that these weren’t particularly useful.
The right-of-center screen contains applications that I find it convenient to have quick access together with power controls and my own widgets.
The leftmost screen contains pictures of my children (how could a collection of home screens be complete without that?) and the rightmost screen is kept blank so that I have a test area for the new widgets and wallpapers that I’m developing.
It reads as though I’ve given this all too much thought, but really it’s just evolved this way because I’ve continually adjusted the phone to my way of living and working. What I find most remarkable about this is that for all the years that I’ve been using computers, my desktops have never been anything more than a dumping ground (Windows) or a blank slate (Linux) that I never customize. I’m left pondering why my phone should be so different.
