While it’s old news now that the advent of iOS 4 brought iphone owners a modern way to organize apps with folders, the practicality of deciding how to group similar apps remains a primitive notion.
The commonly accepted practice remains asking yourself a series of technical questions about the app’s functionality and then grouping them according to purpose. I have been following this procedure since being introduced to folders and it has been fraught with difficulty.
Is the calculator a utility or a productivity tool? Does the address book belong in the reference or social folder? After finally making an educated decision on how best to file an application, I was then faced with the problem of relocating it for use. This wasted valuable time. Time I could be using to abuse bandwidth based billing limits with.
I am happy to report that this issue no longer plagues me! I have a achieved iphone freedom and I have done so using the power of colour.
I found that even when utilizing the correctly named function-based folder structure, I was still reliant most of the time on locating the application by it’s prominent colour scheme. This often proved itself when someone else was using my phone and I would be helping them locate something. I would tell them what it looked like rather than where it lived. I probably couldn’t even tell you the names of my folders for that matter.
The dynamics of this new system is easy. Each folder has a colour. Similarly coloured apps are placed together. Most apps are brand driven which lends itself well to recognition by colour.
If you want to try it, please feel free. All I ask is that you put the seconds you save toward something more meaningful than I do – like talking to someone face to face about something other than this.
Tags: apps, folders, iphone, organize
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