Tiring of the Rearranging My Apps on iPhone or iPad Game

As I like to check out a few free apps each day for my ipad and iphone, my stash of apps exceeds the number of pages allotted for the devices.  Sometimes I have a new app that is way off the visible pages of the device, that I would like to move to a page that is visible and easy to access.

When the apps are not visible in the displayed pages of the device, we can't move it via the 'tap and wiggle' and slide to new page method on the device.  So we must do this rearranging of apps within iTunes and sync the new configuration and placement of our apps.

It seems that one can move entire pages, even the invisible or greyed pages to any order in the page scheme in iTunes (as I mentioned a few days ago).  It is also fairly easy to select one or more apps from the same page and then scroll the bar beneath the app page (where icon apps were selected) and move to a new page to drop them.

I noticed that if I moved a single app to a page that was full, that a new page with a single app was added or inserted.  This gave me a new page to move apps to that I wanted to keep on displayed pages.   I could also go from page to page selecting less used apps to move to invisible or greyed pages.  This was very time consuming, selecting, sliding the pages and dropping.

Finally I decided to try something which worked well for me.  I was able to set the view on the left side to categories, if I wished.  I would find all my special travel, game or utility apps in one place and then drag them from the column to a new page.  So in a sense, this method was finding all the apps I wanted to group which might be on separate pages and put them where I wanted without scrolling page to page to find them individually.  Another thing to speed the selection of an app, that you know you want to move, is to search by name in the left column and then drag that icon to the page on the right side.

All and all, I will certainly be happy when the new concept of folders which is suppose to be in the next version 4.0 is here this summer for the iphone and this fall for the ipad.  I am tiring of playing the rearrange app game on my devices.