From the course: iOS 15 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Customize the home screen and add widgets

From the course: iOS 15 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

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Customize the home screen and add widgets

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- [Instructor] In iOS, you can customize the layout of the apps on your home screens, letting you prioritize which apps appear on which screen, and you can also group apps together into folders, which can help reduce the clutter if you have a lot of apps. Let's take a look at how we can customize the home screen as well as letting you group apps together into folders. In iOS 14 the process has changed slightly and offers you a few more options. So let's take a look at how we customize the home screen. First, you can tap and hold on any app icon, and this menu will appear. What you see in the many will depend on what app you tapped on, but you'll always find this edit home screen option. And that puts all the icons into what Apple calls a jiggle mode, which allows you to then drag them around to arrange them on the screen. You can also drag them to the left or right edges to move them onto other pages. Swipe up on the home indicator at the bottom of the screen to exit this mode. Now you can also hold down on any blank area of a home screen, where there isn't an icon, and that immediately takes you into arrangement mode. And you can drag icons around again to arrange your home screen pages. And you can also drag icons on top of each other to group them into folders. I can tap on that folder and give it a more descriptive name and I'll tap Done and tap outside of it. Now I'm still in arrangement mode, so if I want to move multiple apps at once, I can just start dragging one app's icon with my finger. And then while continuing to hold down on that app, you can tap additional icons with another finger. And you can see that groups them all together, letting you move them to other pages or into a folder. Another useful feature of iOS is the ability to add widgets to your home screens. If you swipe left to right from the home screen, you'll get to this view where you'll find a collection of widgets. Widgets are essentially little areas that display data like the current news headlines, the weather, stock prices, your device's battery level, and so on. Tapping on some widgets opens up the full versions of the apps where that information is coming from. Widgets can also live on your main home screen pages in addition to here on the Today page. Placing widgets on your home screen gives you quick access to information that you want to see at a glance without having to swipe to the Today page or to open an app. Now, there are a couple of ways to do this. If you want to move any of these existing widgets to someplace on your home screen, just hold down on any of the widgets. After a second or two, they'll go into jiggle mode, and then you can drag them to the right, off the Today page and onto a home screen. The app icons that may already be there will rearrange themselves to make room. You can also choose from widgets that aren't configured by default. You can do this from the Today screen or from any homepage to add a widget to that homepage. Again, if I wasn't already in jiggle mode, I can just hold down on a blank area of the home screen. And then I'll tap the plus button at the top of the screen. That opens up the widget gallery. And here you can create custom widgets from the built-in Apple apps and for third-party apps that you have installed that support widgets. From here you can scroll through to browse the gallery, or scroll back up to the top and search for a widget by name. For example, stocks. And I can select that. Now, some would just can appear in different sizes, allowing for more or less information to be displayed. When you select a widget this way, you can swipe across to see the size and content options that are available for that particular widget. Generally, the larger the widget, the more content it will display. But also keep in mind that they'll take up more space on your home screen page. So for example, maybe I want to use this one to track a specific stock from my home screen. With it visible, I'll tap Add Widget. And just like that it's added to my home screen. And I can move it around if I want. And depending on the widget, you might be able to tap on it to configure it. In this case, I can tap on this widget, and then enter the stock symbol for the stocks that I want to track, for example, Microsoft. I can select that. And there it is. Now I can swipe up on the home indicator to leave jiggle mode, and I'll always be able to see the current price of Microsoft on this particular home screen page. And tapping that widget opens up the stock app. Now, you can also combine widgets into what are called widget stacks. This is useful because it lets you use multiple widgets without taking up too much space on your home screens. To do this, just add another widget. Again, to hold down on a blank area, tap the plus button. In here I'll select the smaller of the weather widgets and I'll tap Add Widget. So you can see that adds that to this home screen page, but now I can just drag this widget on top of the other one. And I've now created a widget stack. Now, once combined, you can drag that widget stack anywhere you like, but now I can also swipe up and down to browse the data. And you can continue to combine other widgets into a single stack if you like. And lastly, there's also a special widget called the smart stack. This is a widget stack that your iPhone automatically populates with what it thinks will be the most useful widgets for you at that moment. What you see in the smart stack and depend on your location, the time of day, and the apps you use the most frequently. To add the smart stack, just hold down on a blank area of the home screen again, and tap the plus button. And you'll scroll down until you see Smart Stack. The smart stack is currently configurable in three different sizes. I'll pick this middle one, and I'll tap Add Widget, and now it's added to my home screens. And I can swipe to flip through to see what widgets are currently available. And again, tapping on any of these widgets in most cases opens up the related app so I can get more information. Now, if you want, you can reconfigure the smart stack by going into arrange mode again, which I'm still currently in, and tapping the stack. Here you can disable smart rotate if you don't want it automatically displaying what it thinks you want to see. And you can also change the order of the widgets by dragging them up and down here. If there's a widget you know you don't need, you can just swipe it to the left to delete it from the stack. All right, so that's how to customize your home screens and work with widgets in iOS.

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