Personalizing the Way Your iPad Looks and Works
- Personalizing the Lock and Home Screens
- Customizing the Today Screen and Control Center
- Configuring Device Settings
- Managing System Settings
- Managing Your Screen Time
Customize features on your iPad running iOS 12 including the home screen, control center, and system settings.
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This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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In this chapter, you learn how to personalize various aspects of your iPad experience.
Personalizing the Lock and Home Screens- Customizing the Today Screen and Control Center
- Configuring Device Settings
- Managing System Settings
- Managing Your Screen Time
Every iPad looks and acts the same right out of the box. But that doesn’t mean you can’t configure your iPad to your own personal tastes.
Want a different background picture? You can do that. Want a brighter or dimmer screen? You can do that, too. Don’t like the way you receive notifications onscreen, and from which apps? Then change the notification settings.
Truth is, there’s a lot you can do to personalize your very own iPad. This chapter walks you through managing your screens, backgrounds, and more detailed settings. Change is coming!
Personalizing the Lock and Home Screens
One of the most visible things that people like to change is the look of the iPad screens. You can change the background wallpaper of the Lock and Home screens as well as the way app icons are arranged onscreen.
Change the Wallpaper
The default wallpaper you see on your iPad’s Home and Lock screens is pretty enough, but you can probably find something more to your liking. You can choose different wallpaper for the Lock and Home screens or use the same wallpaper for both.
From the Dock or Home screen, tap the Settings icon to display the Settings screen.
Tap Wallpaper in the left column.
Your current wallpaper is displayed on thumbnails of your Lock (left) and Home (right) screens. Tap Choose a New Wallpaper.
Tap Dynamic to select one of Apple’s supplied dynamic (moving) wallpapers. Or...
Tap Stills to select one of Apple’s supplied still photos. Or...
Tap one of the photo folders to use one of your own pictures as wallpaper.
Tap to select one of the available choices.
To create a slight motion effect for the background, tap to turn on Perspective Zoom.
Tap Set Lock Screen to set this picture for only your Lock screen.
Tap Set Home Screen to set this picture for only your Home screen.
Tap Set Both to use this picture as the background for both your Lock and Home screens.
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Arrange App Icons
Whatever size iPad you have, app icons are displayed on the Home screen in the same 4 × 5 grid. (That’s 4 columns by 5 rows if held vertically, or 4 rows by 5 columns if held horizontally.) There’s also the Dock that floats at the bottom of the screen, where you can permanently “dock” icons for your most-used apps.
Which icons appear where on your Home screens is totally up to you. You can easily move icons from one position to another, and even from one screen to another.
Press and hold the icon you want to move until all the icons onscreen start to jiggle. (You also see a little X next to each icon, which means you’re in editing mode.) You can tap the X to delete an app, if you want.
Drag the icon to a new position. The other icons rearrange themselves to make room. Lift your finger when the icon is in place.
Press the Home button to return to normal screen mode.
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Add Icons to and Remove Icons from the Dock
The Dock is that area at the bottom of every screen that holds icons for your most-used apps. By default, the Dock holds five set icons—Settings, Messages, Safari (web browser), Mail, and Music—plus icons for the three most recently used apps. You can remove any of the five default app icons or add icons for other apps. In fact, you can populate the Dock with more than a dozen icons.
If you stock up the Dock with icons for the apps you use most, you won’t have to move back to the Home screen as often. Because the Dock hovers on top of most open apps (and you can redisplay it simply by swiping up from the bottom of the screen), you can do all your app launching from the Dock rather than from the Home screen.
Add an icon to the Dock by dragging it from any screen down to the Dock.
Rearrange icons on the Dock by dragging any icon to a new position.
Remove an icon from the Dock by dragging it from the Dock to any Home screen.
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Organize Apps with Folders
If you have too many apps crowding too many screens, you can organize those apps into folders. Each folder can contain multiple apps; to open a folder, tap it and then tap the appropriate app inside.
Create a new folder by dragging one icon on top of another. This creates the folder, gives it a name, and displays it full screen.
Tap anywhere outside the folder to close the folder and return to the desktop. The folder is displayed in position there. (You can drag the folder to move it to another position if you like.)
Add another app to this folder by dragging the app icon on top of the folder icon.
Remove an app from a folder by opening the folder and then dragging the icon outside of the folder.
Rename a folder by tapping the folder icon to open the folder and then pressing the default folder name. You can then use the onscreen keyboard to edit or enter a new name.
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