One of my favorite iPhone tricks has to be assigning the camera app to launch whenever you double click on the home button. Sadly, if you’re running iOS 4, Apple’s latest and greatest operating system for i-Devices, this trick no longer works. Double clicking the home button now brings up an application switcher, allowing you to scroll through all the recently launched apps on your iPhone (as seen to the right).
Don’t despair, Apple giveth when they taketh away, though. You can now create folders of apps on your iPhone. Just press down on an app’s icon until it wiggles. Then drag that icon onto another icon you want to group together and a folder is created. You can drag in up to 12 apps into one folder, and you can even name that folder whatever you want.
Back to our camera conundrum, though: can I still get easy access to the camera? I could just put it in my iPhone’s Dock (that’s the row of four icons at the bottom of your iPhone’s screen), but I don’t use the camera enough to devote one of those four coveted spots to it alone. I do, however, have a few apps that I use quite frequently.
I bet you can see where this is going: create a folder with your most used apps and put that into the Dock. As you can see I created a folder named ‘Favs’ that includes Twitter, the Camera, We Rule, and TaskPaper. Now tweeting, snapping a pic, wasting some time, or getting stuff done are all a tap away.
Each folder can hold up to 12 apps, and the Dock itself can hold 4 icons (either singular apps or folders) so you could cram up to 48 apps into your Dock if you like. I have found that 4 is the number that I can manage without being overwhelmed, but your mileage may vary.
Check out the video to see this tip in action.
