Table of Contents |
| Home Screen Layout - Display Order

The Display Order is the arrangement of applications and web clips ('icons') on the Home Screen. Apple have not yet come up with a very good way to manage organizing a lot of icons. This page makes the process a lot easier. You can change the order to your liking. It will take effect only with the Set Display Order function in the device menu. Display Orders cannot be part of a theme, because WinterBoard does not provide for this functionality.
Gaps
Normally, there cannot be any gaps between icons and there has to be at least one icon on a page. An easy way to add gaps is by adding applications or web clips with no name and invisible icons. iFuntastic makes this even easier: when you write the display order to the phone, it adds the minimum number of necessary dummy web clips (or placeholders) to maintain the desired spacing. You can show or hide the gaps in iFuntastic with an option in the View menu. Gaps are represented by gray dots. Select Allow Gaps in the Command and options menu to do so. You can further specify Allow Gaps in Dock to fill empty spaces in the dock. The dock row is treated specially by the phone OS: if there are less than 4 icons in it, they are grouped together and centered. Putting placeholders into the empty space suppresses this behavior. Lastly, Allow Empty Pages puts a single placeholder onto all pages without any icons. Otherwise, these pages would not appear on the phone.
Rearranging Icons
You can click on an icon and drag it to another slot. If the slot is filled, then all following icons will be shifted to make room. Hold down the shift or option keys to select multiple icons; click in an empty space to clear the selection.
Rearranging Pages
If you click on the status bar of one of the pages, all icons on the page are selected. If you click and drag the status bar, you can move the whole page.
What Happens when You Drag a Selection
When dragging a selection, iFuntastic adjusts the Display Order according to the following rules:

- remove the selection and adjust the display order
- a selection is just a list of apps - all location and spacing information is lost
- insert the selection at the current mouse position and adjust
- try to leave the dock row alone, unless the insertion point is the dock row

What 'adjust' means depends on the settings. iFuntastic creates a flat list of apps from top left to bottom right, then re-assigns the apps to the pages in order. If gaps are allowed, then empty spaces are filled in with placeholders, otherwise apps are moved to the next available slot.
These rules can make the layout change in unexpected ways, but if you take a moment to think about it, it will make sense. You can always drag the selection off the phone image to cancel the drag operation.
View Menu
Show Gaps you can add gaps between applications when setting the display order. This option makes the gaps visible with a gray dot.
Wiggle when rearranging when changing the display order, apps will wiggle similarly to the phone; this is just eye candy and may slow things down. You can switch it off with this option.
Command and Options Menu
The Display Order cannot be part of a theme, but you can use custom applications to switch between prepared display order packages. Save Display Order as Package lets you save a display order as a package. You can then create an application on the Jack the Scripter page that installs the package. You can use this also as a convenient way to save different display orders - the Load Display Order from submenu lets you load a display order from a package or another theme. Revert to Last Saved Display Order and Load Display Order from Device are hopefully self explanatory.
The utility commands in the Grouping sections let you re-arrange the icons automatically.
Extra! Extra! Extra Columns
There are two third-party libraries that allow you to have an additional icon in the dock (Five Icon Dock,) and a fifth column of icons on the main pages (Five Column SpringBoard.) I cannot recommend the latter, since it causes some problems, but if you have it installed (or want to install it,) iFuntastic can accommodate you. If you choose either or both enhancements, iFuntastic will prompt you to install the libraries or, if they are installed, enable and disable them as necessary.
Endless 'Respring'
Note that if you fill all available slots with placeholders and apps, you won't be able to install additional apps or web clips. Worse, if you do, or if you have more than nine pages of applications, the SpringBoard may go into an endless 'respring' loop. It restarts, finds the Display Order to be invalid, then restarts again. If you are near iFuntastic, you can fix this by removing some apps or web clips with the File Manager.