I just try to manage the device itself through folders and pruning of stuff not likely to be played. I rarely sync, and when I do I just plug it in and walk away. Like others have said, Itunes is unworkable to use for app management. I consider it disaster recovery only. If and when a disaster strikes, I'll deal with it. Like others have said, I try to be careful on the freebies, and if I do download something on a whim to try, I try to delete it right then if it doesnt measure up. Because I sync so infrequently, many free apps never make it to itunes on the computer, which I think I think is a good thing. Having more then 2-300 apps to me indicates a collector. I dont want to be a collector, I'm a gamer.
Icing on the cake is, one now cannot search in the apps tab when the iDevice is connected for the name!
Yes you can, they just made it confusing - you know the iTunes search in the upper left-hand corner? The one that doesn't work when you have your device plugged in? Now it works when you are on the apps tab. That one really threw me for a loop when I updated iTunes.
That's funny how it looks weird for me. Let say you have 100 games because you "are a game and not a collector", one year later what happen? Then two years later? You implicitly mean you use the games and when finished drop them then use different games and so on. I would say that the gamer take care of history, replay old games, and so on. Keeping track of a collection is fitting this approach and is trying to avoid a total garbage. Many people in this thread complain to not have a file system like in standard OS. But with that many games, even hierarchy of folder aren't a good way to keep track of such a big collection.
Meh, I think games on this device are meant to be collected. My library of 500+ paid games seems to agree with me. $40 per month weee
I don't use folders at all. I just sort out my favourite games on the second page and work backwards. I generally keep my games to 3 pages full. Any longer and I know I need to cut down on some games I don't play anymore.
Guess I'm a collector on account of not having time to manage my games since I'm too busy playing them.
I'm at 975 apps right now between my iPhone 4 and iPad. I have 25 pages of apps on my iPad. Of course, only the first 11 of these are visible right now on the iPad. The rest are what I call "shadow pages" in iTunes. I can load them using the search screen on the iPad. I've given up actually trying to organize them on the iPad until folders are available. Given that iTunes is horrible for managing apps, I'm concerned about the coming 4.2 update. I have several hundred comic books in my copy of Comic Zeal. I had to give up backing up my iPad because of Apple's insistence on not allowing a real file system causing any addition to an app like that to have to back up the whole thing again. My iPad would take 2 full days at this point to back up. I don't want to not use it for 2 or more days. As for organizing the apps, right now I do that in a spreadsheet. On the Apps screen, you can print your apps. Print will let you bring up a "song listing" setting. I then choose custom as the theme to use. That prints only the columns I have set to view. I then actually print to a PDF file. I can copy and paste easily from that into a spreadsheet. The selection is by column, so just pasting the names is easy if I want. (This is on a Mac, it may be different under Windows). That gives me a list of all apps sorted alphabetically. I also did one by app kind so I could more easily just include the ones on my iPad. I then edited this to a master list of iPad apps in a spreadsheet so I know what to search for. Evernote stores this very well and updates automatically as I edit it on my computer. Now, whenever I download a new app, I just add it to the spreadsheet. I recently added a 2nd copy of the spreadsheet where I'm busily trying to sort things in preparation for folders.
I'm at 257 apps right now after clearing out about 100 free games that I never played and never will. I keep my 1st home screen with the usual default apps like the calendar, weather, game center, etc. along with Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. My second page is all of my non-game apps and are all organized in folders like Reference, Shopping, News, Sports, Productivity, Social, Travel, etc. My third page is my most played games page and has the 14 apps I'm currently playing the most along with two folders: Favorites and Unfinished. Favorites includes the likes of Fruit Ninja, Doodle Jump, etc that are always good for a quick 60 second play session, and unfinished has games that I intend to get around to finally completing at some point. My fourth page has 15 folders that categorize all of the rest of my games, along with a folder that has my Unplayed games which are games I've bought on sale and haven't had time to get around to yet. I use Infinifolers to put as many apps as I want in folders which helps me keep only 4 home screens. I don't know what I'd do without it. I'm not really sure why Apple put a limit of 12 apps for their folders.
Pretty cool how similar our brains work I can't use infinifolders though. But I keep around 15-20 GB of music at all times so I don't have room for too many apps. Also, I tend to stuff blurry icons in folders, only high res icons stay on my home screens.
Nice trick, not sure how I could use it because the full list of app I have in itunes is a huge garbage. But I'll certainly find a way to use that trick.
You are a life saver! I think they did that so that it consumes lesser / fewer resources (though Mine is on the right)
