iPhone - Tip of the week - The Home button

One of the iPhone's design tenet was to minimize the number of hardware buttons. The result is the sleek design of the iPhone with only four hardware buttons; the power/standby button, the silent/vibrate switch, the volume toggle, and the Home button. The Home button is the only hardware button on the face of the device. The main purpose of the Home button is to exit applications or return to the first Home screen, however it has a couple of other nifty uses that can be customized in Settings.

The Home button settings under Settings/General/ (slide down to) Home Button. There are two setting categories; the first at the top of the screen, provides three choices when you double click the Home button. The first choice is to display the first Home page, this is the same as single clicking, I am not sure of the value of this option. The second choice is to display the Phone Favorites, I find this option very useful when I need to make a call to a Favorite. The third option is to bring up the iPod application, I am not sure I see a lot of value in this one since I keep the iPod application icon on the Home screen bottom static row. The second category allows you to turn on the iPod Controls.

When the iPod is playing this pop up will be displayed, however the function seems to alternate between jumping to the first Home screen and the iPod control. I am not sure if this is the way it was intended to work or a bug. The more interesting feature with this option is when the iPhone is in standby.

Clicking the Home button once when the iPhone is in standby will bring up the iPod controls whether the iPod is playing or not. This is great way to quickly access the last playlist/artist/album you were playing.

The other three purposes of the home button:

1. To kill an application when it is locked up. Holding it down for about 10 seconds will forcibly terminate the application and return you to the home screen.
2. If the iPhone is locked up (I can't even remember when this last time it happened to me), hold the the power/standby button simultaneously with the home button until the iPhone reboots.
3. To perform a screen print which sends the screen image to your Camera Roll under Photos, hold the the power/standby button simultaneously with the home button briefly. A gray flash will appear to acknowledge the screen print.

Comments

[Wizard]

You probably wanted a 'design tenet', instead of a 'design tenant'.

[sskarlatos]

Wizard, you are correct. Thanks for catching that.