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This is why the home button has a square on it

musika

musika

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Just occurred to me --- I feel incredibly slow ---

The square on the home button symbolizes an app icon. 😱

The curves are the same. And when iPhone first came around, it was known as "the revolutionary new phone with a bunch of candy-coloured little rounded squares you can tap on". It's so simple.

Brilliant little Apple Detail.

Sorry if this was obvious to people! 😀
 
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Spectrum Abuser said:
Or it could just legitimately be a design to fill in the home button.
Click to expand...

That's what I had always thought, but its the same dimensions, and it makes sense. If you wanna get back to your page with icons, click the button with the icon outline on it!
 
Good eyes!

I had just mentioned this again in a post about a month ago:

"Sidenote to those who don't know: the rounded box on the iPhone Home button is a blank app icon. It's supposed to indicate that the Home button will take us back to a page full of apps."
Click to expand...
 
Good post. I had never thought about that either. But looking at it, it is the same shape as the app icons. Pretty cool.
 
Nice thinking, haven't really given much thought till now.

Apple should stay with the circular home button, synonymous with clickwheel, it should not be changed.
 
S7A2G6 said:
Made me chuckle.

It may be a home symbol, much like Droid, but to lower the cost of the phone, they left the roof off.

Yeah. That's it.
Click to expand...

In the back of my head, I always wondered why it was never a home symbol.
 
Wow, soo simple yet I was clueless this whole time.

Now if apple can make that square on the home button glow during phone calls/messages/notications I will be blown away. 🙂
 
F123D said:
Wow, soo simple yet I was clueless this whole time.

Now if apple can make that square on the home button glow during phone calls/messages/notications I will be blown away. 🙂
Click to expand...

It glows while you are on a call, and not i speaker mode. You have to be quick to catch it. It glows blue. 😛
 
You all seriously never noticed that before? I thought it was common sense that if you press the home button, with the app icon on it, it would take you back to all of the app icons on your iPhone.

6154512519_f3ef38eded.jpg
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

Brilliant!
 
lukefinch said:
You all seriously never noticed that before? I thought it was common sense that if you press the home button, with the app icon on it, it would take you back to all of the app icons on your iPhone
Click to expand...

No facepalm is called for. Out of millions of users, I'd bet that almost nobody noticed.

Perhaps it would've been more obvious if it had been a tiny grid of colored icons, similar to the way that homescreen folders look. And not use a round button, which doesn't look like a homescreen background.

However, using a single app icon shape is nicely minimalistic.

I'm also pretty sure that I've seen a tiny grid used for that purpose on a handheld before.

Finally, a tiny grid would've locked them into the grid paradigm, which they might not have wanted to do at first.
 
It's also square so that it looks exactly the same no matter which orientation you're holding your device in. That goes especially for the iPad, which can work upside-down as well. 🙂
 
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