iOS 14 Could Make Changing Your Wallpaper Much Easier

Matt Birchler on ios, concept | | 1 min read
iOS 14 Could Make Changing Your Wallpaper Much Easier

In case you didn't know yet, iOS 14 lets you enter jiggle mode by holding down on any empty part of your home screen. This lets you delete apps, move apps to your App Library, add widgets, and even hide entire screens. It should also let you change your wallpaper.

For those who haven't used iOS 14 yet, here's the concept next to the current version of jiggle mode in beta 1:

Pretty subtle, but I'd love to see this be how you get to wallpaper settings instead of bundling it in the Settings app.

Making Control Center and Notifications More Discoverable with a Cursor on the iPad

Matt Birchler on ipad, concept | | 1 min read
Making Control Center and Notifications More Discoverable with a Cursor on the iPad

So this is a little janky, but I mocked up a quick idea to make the options to access notifications and Control Center more discoverable when using a cursor. Here's an animated version:

The currnet UI just highlights the date/time or battery/wifi/etc blocks, and clicking on them brings up notifications or Control Center. If you don't know how this works already, you may not even be able to guess which is which, since "what happens when I click the battery icon?" isn't natually answered by either option. 🙃

Apple should spend more than 30 minutes on it and make it prettier. Also, if you decide the menu bar can expand, then you don't need to keep buttons in the same place. Hell, you could even add more things up there if you wanted, so there's quite a bit of iteration to happen here. But this was my first stab at something I hope others will take further.