Springboard and You
I just read Tog’s article Restoring Spring to iPhone/iPod Touch and while he accurately identifies problems with managing more than a couple screens’ worth of apps in Springboard, his proposed improvements leave much to be desired. And it’s no wonder, because his recommendations are based on the wrong analogy.
Springboard is the formal name of the home screen on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Like the Mac Finder or the Windows Desktop, Springboard enables you to find the particular app you need. (Italics mine.)
Wrong.
It’s a mistake to think of Springboard as a sort of iPhone OS Finder. It’s much more constructive to compare it to the the Mac OS X Dock. For at least the first year of the Springboard app’s life, there was no such thing as a third-party application for the OS. ‘Apps you could launch quickly’ and ‘all apps on the OS’ were equivalent sets. This makes sense. If I only had twenty applications on my desktop Mac, well, I’d probably just put them all in the Dock and not bother with things like Finder, Quicksilver, etc.
But I don’t have only twenty applications on my desktop Mac. In the /Applications hierarchy alone I have three hundred and fucking thirteen. (Yes, that’s accurate. I just now wrote a python script to tally them. I confess to being a little surprised at just how many there are.)
I don’t know about you, but the mere thought of trying to find and launch one of three hundred and fucking thirteen applications using the Dock makes me kind of sick.
But I don’t use the dock to launch all my applications and neither do you. You and I put maybe the ten or twenty most-used applications’ icons in the dock and use Finder when we need, say, Disk Utility or Microsoft Word or some other application we hardly ever use. Even if you were to only use the applications that come standard with Mac OS X and never, ever install anything else, it’s still too many applications to manage from the Dock. Don’t believe me? Drag all the apps in ‘/Applications/Utilities’ to your Dock. It’s not hard to imagine the Dock quickly going from ‘useful quick launch utility’ to ‘Windows Start menu.’
So, we need to change our thinking about the problem from “Springboard is a crappy Finder” to “Springboard is an excellent Dock but there’s no other way on iPhone OS to organize and launch applications,”
Put differently, fill in the blanks: “Dock is to Finder as Springboard is to ____________”
Clearly, what’s needed on iPhone OS is a separate app for finding and launching less frequently used applications. Apple could call it, oh, I don’t know, ‘Applications.’ Applications.app would work a lot like the Applications folder on your Mac. It would have a standard Cocoa Touch drill-down UITableView/UITableViewController interface for hierarchical data. Applications would install to the top level of the hierarchy by default. In addition to applications, this top level would contain ‘categories’—containers analogous to sub-folders in Mac OS X Finder. The user could create categories with names like ‘Travel’ and these categories would themselves have user-created sub-categories like ‘London’ creating sensible, user-defined drill-down hierarchies like ‘/Applications/Travel/London,’ or ‘/Applications/Games/OMGSoFuckingAwesome/,’ the latter into which you would naturally put Ramp Champ and Canabalt.
Actually, you’d probably put those last two in Springboard, too, so you could launch them quickly. And how would you do that in Applications.app? Well, ‘Springboard’ would be a top-level category in the Applications app into which users can place applications, with sub-categories for each of Springboard’s pages.
The great thing about this solution is that it uses concepts and user interface elements that iPhone OS users are already familiar with rather than overload Springboard with conceptual and interface complexity that are arguably a bigger problem than the one they were designed to solve. With this solution, Springboard stays good at what it’s good at—finding and launching a handful of most-used apps very quickly and we introduce a new application, Applications, to solve a different problem.
Apps that are small, sharp, designed for a single-purpose, and highly polished are part of the design foundation of iPhone OS. Don’t agree? Ask yourself this: Do we use Springboard to download apps from the app store?
No, we don’t. There’s an app for that.
