Hastag iPhoneScreenMonk

What is this blog about?

There are 2 critical components in #iPhoneScreenMonk - iPhone screen and Monk. Let's start from beginning.

According to Wikipedia was Monk an American comedy-drama detective mystery television series. Adrian Monk was a detective for the San Francisco Police Department until his wife, Trudy, was killed by a car bomb in a parking garage. He believes that Trudy's death was part of a larger conspiracy that she had uncovered during her time as a journalist.

Important attribute of Monk is his OCD and numerous compulsive habits and a number of phobias compound his situation, such as his fear of germs. Monk is afraid of 312 things, including milk, ladybugs, harmonicas, heights, asymmetry, enclosed spaces, foods touching on his plate, messes, and risk.

Now we know a little bit about the Monk part. Then there is an iPhone screen, that is mess out of the box. I don't mean, the device itself is mess. I like it a lot and i don't even consider changing the platform. But there is no zen, if you look at the screen. The applications are not organised and it looks little bit like a mess. Isn't it?

 I'm not exactly like a Monk, but i don't want my everyday primary device screen look like this. So, what can you do about it? You can remove the mess and take the clutter out of the screen by organising the applications to the folders according to the colour - light yellow apps to one and deep yellow to the other. Like this:

Problem solved? Not too fast.

There is so called "third party" in this formula - app developers. Time to time they have money to hire someone called designer, who is stepping in and kicking immediately off his or her first project - total redesign of the product. Everything that was black in previous version, is going now to be white. Because we can.

Normally users wouldn't notice. You open your communicators folder and in a split second you'll still intuitively klick on the right icon. But iPhone Screen Monks will catch the designers immediately. Exhibit A to proof my case:

So, this blog is rendezvous of the Monks with iPhones. But there is more.

Big Questions.

You probably think now - what a big deal. And you are right. It's not a big deal. I can fit this red and white app to new folder dedicated for "red dot on the white background" apps and forget about it. And as i already said - most of the users would not see the difference anyway.

Therefore Big Question no. 1 naturally is - if there is no difference, why to change the icon in the first place? Maybe it's not just the icon? Maybe these changes are related to big releases and there is so much more?

That leads us to Big Question no. 2 - what changes besides the icon? Is new functionality added or any major changes done at the same time they change the icon?

This is what we want to find out here. From release notes and from public sources, news, corporate blogs, social media etc.

And this is not survey across all App Store and millions of apps. I have currently 366 apps in my iPhone and i blog about these. If you have noticed some changes in your app icons lately, let me know and we'll find out together, what are the answers to Big Questions.

If you are inspired about the #iPhoneScreenMonk idea, please tag us in social media. Thank You for joining the Monks!