Arranging Apps on the old iPad

Many years ago, when I worked for a company in a cubicle, after one of our many relocations, all of the engineers were busy rearranging our cubicles.  You had a desk, a chair, a computer, a file cabinet, usually a storage cabinet and whatever else you wanted which you could “appropriate”.  You were free to put these where you wanted.  Some people were trying to be innovative, others copied.  A wise engineer, older than me at the time, viewed the scene and remarked Yes, it’s hard to figure out the “optimum” arrangement.  Maybe stay at home and have them send the check every month.  He was great about saying stuff like that with a straight face.

I feel the same way about apps on my iPad Mini, which I use mostly for reading music notation with forScore, but of course it’s a note pad and web browser too.  I won’t do email on an iPad because I’m never far away from my MacBook Air, and I can type faster on a real keyboard.  iTunes tells me I have 34 apps.  I’d rearranged the apps once, “logically”, into three screens, but it never quite made sense.  Today I decided it do it like I do my bookmarks - in alphabetical order.

After a few minutes, I’m liking it.  Screen 1 has A-G, then I-M, N-P and finally S-Z.  If you use one of our bookmarking apps to keep your bookmarks in alphabetical order, you might be a person, like me, that thinks in alphabetical order.  So maybe you’d like this too.  Only problem - I wish I could give you an easy way to do it.  The available user interface in iTunes is really tedious.  And, of course, the iPad is pretty thoroughly locked down by Apple so, no, we can’t make an app for that.  We’re stuck with waiting for Apple to improve it.  Oh, well.