After the release of iOS 5 last year, several users complained that the Newsstand app (effectively a “folder” for magazine and newspaper subscriptions) couldn’t be hidden from the Springboard. Because of its nature of glorified folder, users couldn’t even put it away in an existing folder on the Home screen. However, people soon figured out a trick to make the Springboard hide Newsstand.

This year, well-known Cydia developer Filippo Bigarella has released a simple Mac app to hide Newsstand from any iOS device with a single click. I’ve just tested the app personally on my iPhone 5 running iOS 6, and it works as advertised. Even better, the app doesn’t require a jailbreak at all, as it leverages the existing “folder trick”, albeit making it easier to access.

Simply download StifleStand, and open it on your Mac. Make sure a device is plugged in and recognized by the app. Hit the Hide Newsstand button, and watch as Newsstand gets put into a folder called “Magic” on your Home screen. It literally takes one second to complete.

Please note: Just like on iOS 5 last year, opening Newsstand from a folder will crash Springboard. Use this tweak only if you don’t use Newsstand.

You can then rename the folder and put more apps into it. One bug I’ve noticed is that, because Newsstand isn’t meant to be put into a folder, if the folder is closed you won’t see the smaller preview icon for Newsstand. You can avoid this by placing more apps into the folder, leaving Newsstand at the end, so you won’t see the empty spot from your Home screen.

StifleStand works on any device and it’s super-easy to use. Download it here, and watch a demo video by iDownloadBlog here.

I’ve been thinking about the problems I have with iOS’ Home screen concept for years now, but I never fully grasped what was, exactly, that with time made using the Home screen — and thus the whole system of Springboard pages — clunky and annoying. Until it hit me earlier today, and suddenly everything started to make sense.

The iOS Home screen is conceptually broken. Not “broken” as in unusable, unstable or technically flawed. From an engineering standpoint, the iOS Home  screen works. The concept of the Home screen we interact with today is broken because the Home screen wants to be a real, physical, tangible surface while providing access to the gates of the intangible: apps. Apps are data, information, connectivity, presentation, media. Digital content isn’t tangible in the sense that it exists in a physical space, unless you count the atoms and the electrons and the bits that make using an app possible. But that’s a long stretch. The iOS Home screen is based on the concept that app icons are objects on top of it;  this has created a series of issues over the years.

Throughout the release history of iOS, Apple had to compromise and, I believe, implement functionalities the original Home screen wasn’t meant to support. First users wanted third-party apps, Apple waited, but eventually allowed developers to create software to install on an iPhone or iPod touch. Apps are the most important addition to the operating system to date, and they kickstarted the App Store revolution we’re witnessing. In allowing third-party developers to create apps, however, Apple essentially lost control over the display of objects on the Home screen — Apple may be able to check upon the inner workings of an app, but they can’t ban apps based on lack of taste in choosing an icon. And with that, developers were free to choose Home screen icons that don’t necessarily resemble real-life objects, thus breaking the metaphor of manipulating “badges on a table”, as I like to think of it. Have you noticed how almost every built-in, Apple-made iOS app has an icon that resembles a real-life object? The only exception? The App Store and iTunes icons. Which are marketplaces for digital content.

Apple states it clearly in the iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

When virtual objects and actions in an application are metaphors for objects and actions in the real world, users quickly grasp how to use the app. The classic example of a software metaphor is the folder: People put things in folders in the real world, so they immediately understand the idea of putting files into folders on a computer.

Think of the objects and scenes you design as opportunities to communicate with users and to express the essence of your app. Don’t feel that you must strive for scrupulous accuracy. Often, an amplified or enhanced portrayal of something can seem more real, and convey more meaning, than a faithful likeness.

Portray real substances accurately. Icons that represent real objects should also look as though they are made of real materials and have real mass. Realistic icons accurately replicate the characteristics of substances such as fabric, glass, paper, and metal, and convey an object’s weight and feel.

Later, users wanted multitasking and folders. Unsurprisingly, Apple gave them implementations of these features that look like objects, in this case objects with linen. Here’s where the situation gets more complex: folders and the multitasking tray, unlike app icons, actively interact with the Home screen, they don’t just sit on top of it. The way Apple designed them, the multitasking tray resides as linen below the Home screen, and folders are tiny containers with a linen background that expands atop of the Home screen. You can see how the entire concept of Home screen as a surface starts crackling under the design weight of  these features: is the Home screen a surface that has another layer underneath? Another one above as well? What do you mean I have music controls in the multitasking tray, too?

Most recently, iOS users began asking more vigorously for a better notification system, a unified reading environment for magazines, and widgets. Apple gave them Notification Center and Newsstand, but didn’t announce anything widget-related, at least for the Home screen. The Home screen, with iOS 5, got two new additions: a new layer, Notification Center, and a new default icon, Newsstand, which isn’t really an icon but it’s a folder with a different background and shelves.

As I said, I believe choosing the right approach to delivering new functionalities and keeping the original Home screen concept got trickier for Apple over the years. What started as a black background with a few default apps turned into a customizable area of hundreds of app icons with folders and multiple pages with a series of additional layers managed by the overly abused linen texture. But the seed of the broken concept can be seen way back into iPhone OS history: think about Spotlight and Springboard page indicators. What are they — how do they fit into the metaphor of a physical surface with objects on top of it? Surfaces don’t have search boxes and indicators. Notebooks have pages, but you have to flip them and turn them and touch them. Websites have search boxes, but they’re bits and lines of code.

If you follow my theory, you can understand how things start making sense from this perspective. You can’t move multiple app icons at once not because of some technical limitation, but because, I believe, in the original Home screen vision inspired by physics apps were meant as a single entity to manipulate, one at a time. On a table, you can’t “select” multiple buttons and pretend they’re all going to move as you touch only one. That doesn’t make any sense in real life. I could expand this concept to the entire skeuomorphism Vs. interface design, but I’ll leave that for another time. My concern right now is the Home screen, the first thing you see when you unlock a device, when you close an app, the place where you manage your apps, your content. There’s a lot of weirdness and inconsistencies going on in some Apple apps and interfaces, but the Home screen is the prime example of a user interface meant for 2007 which was subsequently patched and refined and patched again to accomodate new functionalities introduced in iOS (the same happened with the Home button). You could argue that some proposed features, such as widgets, haven’t been implemented yet because of technical constraints. It’s fair argument, and I’ll take it. Yet I think that, even if complex from an implementation standpoint, it’s the concept itself that makes widgets difficult with the current Home screen.

The problem Apple needs to overcome is that the Home screen tries to be a real object while providing access to the gates of the digital world. To reinvent it, Apple needs to tear apart the whole concept and rebuild it from the ground up.

It appears a new trend among independent iOS developers is that of creating shortcuts to save time on tedious iOS tasks such as activating WiFi and Bluetooth, open third-party applications, or call someone. First came a bunch of web-based tools to create this kind of home screen shortcuts, including design extraordinaire Jeff Broderick’s Settings. We’ve covered this whole shortcut phenomenon quite extensively on MacStories, including Siri and the iPhone’s URL schemes (links that redirect iOS to apps or specific sections inside an app) and Launch Center, an app that spurred a debate around shortcuts and Apple’s review policies after the app was rejected from the App Store, whereas similar tools had been approved for sale. It was also discovered that Apple plans on making Settings unaccessible via URL schemes on the upcoming iOS 5.1.

Now Jeff Broderick is back at it, pouring his typical style and attention to detail into a new project called QuickContact. QuickContact allows you to create Home screen icons for people to call or send a text message to; you can choose between 15 icons designed by Broderick or upload your own upon creating a new shortcut, which is done through Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch. I won’t lie — I like Jeff’s style a lot, but I wish the web app was capable of supporting email addresses, too, besides phone numbers; I’d also like to launch the Phone or Messages apps directly without opening Mobile Safari first. Last, the app requires you to install a certificate on your device for this automation to work, and Broderick specifies on his website that “No information is saved”.

For those interested in trying out this first version of QuickContact, you can check out the project’s page here.

Just two weeks ago we covered iPhone URL schemes, those native URLs specific to iOS applications like Facebook or Twitter that can be used to launch an app’s section (Facebook’s Messages view, Twitter’s Mentions tab) with a single tap. As it turns out, however, URL schemes aren’t exclusive to third-party apps that have implemented them, as Apple is using the same system to assign a unique URL to specific sections in the iOS Settings app. Which means that, in theory, you should be able to easily launch Bluetooth settings or iCloud’s control panel by tapping on a link.

Of all the solutions that have surfaced in the past weeks to create Home screen shortcuts for Settings without jailbreaking a device, I’d say IconSettings is the most clever, nicest and easiest to use. As noted by Engadget, you just visit this webpage, decide which settings panels to turn into Home screen icons, and manually add a webpage to the Home screen using Safari. That webpage will turn into an icon, which will launch the settings panel you chose from the list. Quite simple.

There’s a catch: whilst jailbreak apps like SBSettings really put iOS Settings’ in another location (in SBSettings’ case, a dropdown menu), IconSettings simply creates visual bookmarks for URLs that redirect to the Settings app. And by “redirect” I mean that you’ll briefly notice Safari launching before you’re brought to the selected settings panel you need. This should be no big deal as the animation is very short, but this method will still leave an open tab in your Mobile Safari (remember, you’re still launching a URL). So yes, IconSettings is a pretty cool web-based trick to create Home screen shortcuts for commonly accessed Settings, but keep in mind that Safari will keep track of these URLs.

If you don’t have a jailbroken device and you’re willing to compromise to have Settings shortcuts on your Home screen, check out IconSettings here. Its icons are fairly good-looking, too.

Safari received quite a substantial speed bump with iOS 4.3 when Apple added the Nitro engine, a powerful JavaScript engine. However, some were left disappointed when it was revealed that the engine didn’t work with web apps that had been pinned to the home screen.

It seems that iOS 5 will eventually fix this inconsistency and bring those web apps up to speed. It comes after a user on Hacker News answered a question asking whether Nitro was included for those web apps pinned to the home screen.

This is probably breaking my NDA to say this, but yes, they did. Web.app now has the ‘dynamic-codesigning’ entitlement, which enables Nitro.

Apps that use the UIWebView alternative to Safari apparently won’t be getting Nitro, though the same user says that this is a security restriction rather than an inconsistency.

[Via CNet]

In the weeks leading to Apple’s WWDC announcements, there was one possible feature of iOS 5 that was making the rounds of the Internet, meeting many people’s expectations for the new OS: the possibility to create shortcuts for anything on a device’s Home screen would have been an interesting option to, say, let users create a WiFi icon to quickly access Network settings without opening the dedicated app. Playing around with the concept of aliases and app-specific shortcuts, the theories surrounding iOS 5 pointed at Apple building such a functionality to reduce the time spent tapping and scrolling around. That, of course, didn’t happen, but it hasn’t stopped third-party developers from releasing their own solutions that take on this idea of “creating Home screen shortcuts”.

Musicon, a new iPhone app by developer Fabian Kreiser, enables you to create Home screen icons for music albums you have synced on your device or, if you’re rocking the latest iCloud features, bought on your computer and automatically pushed to your iPhone. Musicon works like this: it scans your music library (the one from iPod.app, or Music.app if you’re already on iOS 5) and fetches albums and album artworks. If music is playing from the native iOS app, a “Now Playing” button lets you control it — this app isn’t meant to be a music controller on its own, unlike Kreiser’s other iPhone app On Stage. In fact, if you have On Stage (which we reviewed here) installed on your device the app won’t show any advertisement.

Once you’ve found an album you like, select it, and hit the big “Install Webclip” button. The app will already display a preview of the icon that you’ll end up with in the Home screen in the upper section of the screen. As you hit the button, Musicon does its thing to create a shortcut: it takes you to the developer’s website to install a webclip on your device. That’s right, these shortcuts are nothing but links to a webpage that somehow takes you to Musicon after you tap on the icon. Music will start playing in the native iPod app, and Musicon will come in foreground with the playback control UI. Not the most elegant solution if you ask me, but it works and the Home screen icons shine on the Retina Display.

Musicon is free, but I wish I could pay to remove advertising without having to keep On Stage installed. The idea is pretty nice and I can see why some people would want to save a couple of albums for quick access on a daily basis — if you’re one of them, get Musicon here and start creating your own shortcuts.