Why doesn't the homescreen flip to landscape? No, really, why?

[spinna001]

jailbreak your phone and get sbrotator

 

[bruinsrme]

jailbreak your phone and get sbrotator

Agree, missed not having the program andwhen i saw it updated for 4.X it was instantly installed.
Not really sure why Apple has not provided this as a native function

 

[colmaclean]

This is not rocket science. Handhelds have been around for a very long time, and the solutions are pretty obvious.

In many other homescreens, the dock moves to a vertical strip on one side, leaving plenty of room for the regular app icons.

You can also already do this in Mac OS X...

 

[m3coolpix]

jailbreak your phone and get sbrotator

I just found sbrotator this past weekend and purchased it. Really like it, seems to be actively developed and stable (already had an update from when I first installed it).

I think it's because the icons wouldn't fit the same way in landscape. What I mean is that when you include the icon labels (names), each app takes up more vertical space than horizontal. If you look at the iPad, you notice they include lots of room around each app to account for this. The iPhone screen is just too small to maintain that 4x4 matrix the other way especially if you think about putting the dock below it.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying it's a bit more complicated than the homescreen on the iPad. Remember Apple would want to leave pages and dock placements the same in either orientation.

FWIW, sbrotator has settings that allow you to set this how you want (scale the icons so the text fits, and control number of icons per row/column, etc.), and coupled with some settings you can use from Winterboard, I'm impressed.

 

[mrblack927]

FWIW, sbrotator has settings that allow you to set this how you want (scale the icons so the text fits, and control number of icons per row/column, etc.), and coupled with some settings you can use from Winterboard, I'm impressed.

I understand completely and I agree. All I'm saying is that Apple won't do this because they are different. "Shrinking the icons so they fit" is unacceptable. "putting the dock on the side" is unacceptable. Apple takes style and consistency guidelines very seriously. Hell, they published a whole manual of style guidelines that developers must follow if they want their apps to be approved.

I think it will be a long wait for Apple to provide an official implementation for this on the iPhone.

 

[m3coolpix]

Some screenshots of sbrotator....

 

[m3coolpix]

'double post' -- deleted.

and.....FWIW....I don't have any of the scaling or text turned off. The overlap doesn't bother me.

 

[mrblack927]

Okay I just bought and installed sbrotator (to see what all the fuss is about) and it did absolutely nothing. I see the new settings pane and it is "enabled", but nothing happens. Is there some trick to this?

 

[m3coolpix]

I understand completely and I agree. All I'm saying is that Apple won't do this because they are different. "Shrinking the icons so they fit" is unacceptable. "putting the dock on the side" is unacceptable. Apple takes style and consistency guidelines very seriously. Hell, they published a whole manual of style guidelines that developers must follow if they want their apps to be approved.

I think it will be a long wait for Apple to provide an official implementation for this on the iPhone.

True. But, I'm not waiting, I like sbrotator...

Every company has it's strengths and weaknesses (and you can be on either side of this discussion, it's OK). There will also always be critics/fanboys of everything/anything those companies do. Just a fact of internet life.

To me....it's just a fun phone. Even more so when jailbroken. I'm not here to argue about it .

What will be really interesting is....if Apple does do this implementation of rotating the springboard, how much of it will be copied from sbrotator (or more so, how much of it they implement, and how much they cripple)?

 

[m3coolpix]

Okay I just bought and installed sbrotator (to see what all the fuss is about) and it did absolutely nothing. I see the new settings pane and it is "enabled", but nothing happens. Is there some trick to this?

Reboot? Not just respring......

 

[gwsat]

Although I am a longtime Apple guy, I never got an iPhone because I was with T-Mobile and its predecessor, VoiceStream, for many years. Finally, though when my T-Mobile contract rolled over to month to month, I held my nose, shifted to AT&T, and got an iPhone 4. Like the OP and several other posters, I don't like having the homescreen orientation locked into portrait mode when I use landscape for Web browsing, texting, and several other things. As the OP noted, it's not the end of the world but it is just another example of Apple once again depriving its customers of flexibility.

Speaking of flexibility, I originally signed up for AT&T's data package with tethering based on the foolish assumption that I could use Bluetooth to tether the iPhone's 3G capability to my iPad. Ha! The iPad has been crippled in such a way that only those who have a 3G enabled model can use 3G. The iPhone can't be made to tether to a non 3G iPad, no matter the data subscription. Needless to say, I cancelled tethering less than 24 hours after I had signed up for it. I wish I could say that I was surprised but having seen Apple get by with similar stuff over the course of over many years, my reaction was more one of suspicions having been confirmed than surprise or anger.