Author: George Bodenschatz

How can you tinker?

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For my last post for this blog on tinkering, I want to leave you with a few ways you can use tinkering in your life.

Start by Looking for frustrations:

The best place to start tinkering is fixing the things that cause frustration in your life. This is not the only place where you will find things that need tinkering, but these are the places where tinkering opportunities are the most obvious. 

For technology, start with software:

Something we all have to deal with every single day is software. It runs our phones and our computers, and for many students is the portal into classes and assignments in school. Sometimes there are unchangeable quirks or problems with the operating systems and applications we use, but there are also many aspects that are changeable and can vastly improve your experience. Look through the settings and preferences and make changes to make your software better suit you.

There are also many other utilities and small apps that can change the functionality of your devices solely through software, rather than hardware modifications. On my Mac, I use software to snap my windows to certain parts of the screen (Magnet), change the contents of the Touch Bar running above the keyboard (BetterTouchTool), control the fan speed manually (MacsFanControl), and disable certain hardware features (like TurboBoost, which increases the speed of the CPU given temperature headroom) that consume too much power from my battery when I can’t be plugged into a charger (Turbo Boost Switcher). I also change the way my computer looks with custom icons for many of my applications and an application that updates my background to an up-to-date satellite image of the United States.

Unlike physical modifications, any change you make in software can almost always be changed back as easily as it was switched in the first place.

Try new things with old things:

Tinkering works especially well with older things. You can tinker with them to give them new life and new usefulness, or even just as practice. There is nothing to lose when you tinker with something that you no longer use. 

You could repurpose a broken laptop into a makeshift desktop computer station, or even salvage parts from something old or broken to use for a project down the road.

Remember you don’t have to be the one tinkering:

Even as a self-professed tinkerer who loves both fiddling with and fixing things, I don’t always tinker for myself. During quarantine, I had two repairs done through an Apple Authorized Service Provider under warranty: the replacement of a faulty Butterfly keyboard on my sister’s old MacBook and the replacement of my AirPods Pro, which had a known problem with clicking in the audio. 

Paying a professional is not always the best option. Self repair can often save a great sum of money, but there are other great reasons to have someone else tinker for you. These were both repairs that I was not able to, or not comfortable with, completing myself. But they were also both completely free, covered under extended warranty programs from Apple. A free repair is a great reason not to tinker with something yourself. But if you are not comfortable deconstructing a phone or computer to repair it, don’t have access to parts, or just can have something repaired for you by a professional for free, there is great merit to allowing someone else to do your tinkering for you. Just make sure the tinkering gets done. We have lived in a throw-away society for our whole lives, but there is great merit–especially environmentally–in fixing something, rather than disposing of and replacing it. 

Remember that tinkering is not only for technology:

There are a lot of things in the world that need to be tinkered with and improved, not just the things that affect only yourself and fit into small categories like electronics or pens. Look into your community and into the world at large. Figure out how you can tinker the world to be better for other people, as well as for yourself. Look for where change needs to happen, then tinker it into existence.

Tinkering with Coffee… and everything else

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For 18 posts, this blog has focused on tinkering with phones, keyboards, computers, and fountain pens, but tinkering is not exclusive to a relatively small group of technology nerds or an even smaller group of people who like fountain pens. I wrote about tinkering with phones, keyboards, computers, and fountain pens because I like all of those things and found enjoyment in both increasing the pleasure they are to use (like tinkering a fountain pen to be perfect for me) and also just spending time using and tinkering with something I love. But I have also tinkered with something else I love: coffee. 

 

There are three main categories of tinkerable aspects of making a cup coffee: the “beans,” the “brew,”and the “bonuses.”

The “beans” are the coffee itself, and they are distinguished most often by the “roast” and fineness of the grind. The “roast” (usually known as dark, medium, or light) refers to how long/at what temperature the coffee beans were roasted before being ground. The difference in roast is flavor, and though hard for me to describe, it is noticeable. The fineness/coarseness of a coffee bean makes more of a difference in the strength of the coffee when you brew it; finer coffee grinds make stronger coffee, and coarser grinds usually make lighter coffee.

There are many different methods of brewing coffee, some of which (like a typical coffee maker) are better at larger batches, and others (like a Moka, small french press, or pour-over) are better at making smaller batches. There are also differences in flavor as a result of brew time and water temperature during the brew. 

The bonuses come mainly in the form of milk and other things you can add to coffee to augment the flavor. I often enjoy adding hand-frothed whole milk to my coffee when I have time, but when not, I use a little bit of half and half. While I don’t usually sweeten my coffee, I have come to find that adding brown sugar instead of white sugar gives the coffee and warmer and more toasty flavor.

 

After years of cup-by-cup tinkering, I found the way I like coffee best: a light, finely-ground roast, prepared as pour-over with frothed milk and brown sugar. Though a cup of coffee might not seem important enough to think too much about, let alone tinker with, making and drinking coffee is a daily ritual I care about and am willing to tinker with.

At its heart, tinkering is trying to improve something, and as a tinkerer, you should be on the lookout for things in need of improvement. Beyond coffee, pens, and computers, being a tinkerer provides a valuable mindset with which to view the world: seek out things that can be made better, then enact change. Look not only at your own habits or frequent activities that can be made better with tinkering, but also look into your community and find places of injustice and seek out things that are wrong. Once you have found something that needs change, go forth and tinker.

Right to Repair Continued

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What is “repairability”?

I believe repairability applies not only to the ease with which something can be repaired, but also to the accessibility and cost of repairs. If something can only be repaired by the company or specific authorized service providers, and you do not have easy access to either, then that thing is not repairable. If the repair is unreasonably costly, that thing is also not repairable. If the repair takes a long time as a result of any factor, that is not repairable. 

Something that is ideally repairable can be repaired locally, with as little “downtime” (the amount of time something is not in use because it is being repaired) as possible, and at the lowest cost possible. 

 

Why is the Right to Repair important?

In short, the Right to Repair is important because the computers, cars, tools, and many other things that may need repair are important to us. Our devices foster connections between people, facilitate work, and enable recreation. Our cars allow us to travel independently and to new places. The tools we use can help us do jobs, both for employment and personal projects. Their useful longevity is dependent on their repairability, and despite the “throwaway” mindset we are accustomed to, it is often better to fix things rather than replace them.

The Right to Repair may seem like it benefits only “tinkering-minded” people who are interested in fixing something for themselves. That is not the case; the right to repair benefits anyone who needs a repair (which is just about everyone, at some point in time!), as well as those who want to complete the repair themselves, and third-party businesses who complete repairs. 

Having the Right to Repair can mean the difference between a quick, cost effective repair done locally by a third-party and a repair only doable by the company that made the device, which can be more expensive, take longer, and be less convenient. It can also open the door to repair at ALL; sometimes repairs are not possible from the company that made it. For example, Apple does not repair iPads. Full stop. They only offer trade-in options to replace them, then recycle the broken device you traded in. However, with parts currently available through third-party vendors I was able to repair the broken charging port on my iPad Pro, saving myself more than $600. There is great end-user benefit to not needing to fully replace an item when it breaks–it’s cheaper, and there is often no need to transition (copy files, etc.) between devices. There is also benefit to the world in using devices for longer when possible; more devices in use for longer means fewer devices thrown away.

In a softer sense, in the same way that tinkering with something makes a device more your own, the ability to repair a device and make it last longer is an agency that gives you greater ownership of your device. Your phone, computer, car, or any other device you own do not belong to the company that made it. They belong to you, and it is your right to repair them.

Right to Repair Intro

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As a tinkerer with the skills and tools to repair a lot of my devices, one of my biggest frustrations has been having those repairs stymied by the unavailability of custom parts and companies’ unwillingness to release the information needed to make repairs.  I am not alone in this frustration, and over the next few posts I want to share some information on the Right to Repair movement. 

Before I launch into my main discussion, here are a few important definitions:

  • End user – that’s me or you! The end user is someone who uses a phone, laptop, or other piece of technology or tool
  • First party – the company that made a product ex. Apple or John Deere
  • Third party – someone (in this context, normally an independent repair company) who is not the company that made the product or sold the product and is also not the end user. 

 

What is the “Right to Repair”?

The right to repair refers to a movement to make the devices and tools we use last longer by enabling repairs by end users and third parties.. To achieve this, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition calls for five main rights to be established: 

“Information: The documentation, software, and legal ability we need to repair our own products — or choose someone we trust to do it for us.

Parts + Tools: Fair access to service parts and tools, including diagnostics.

Unlocking for Repair and Reuse: We should be able to unlock and modify the software and firmware that is required to operate our products.

Unencumbered Resale: We should be able resell our products (including the software needed to operate them).

Repairable Products: Designers should integrate design for repair and recycling principles into product development.”

What is the repair situation now?

Just to be clear, the current capacity to repair is not zero. In high school, I led a company that repaired everything from the school-issued Chromebooks to student and faculty owned phones and laptops. We could replace batteries on iPhones and screens on laptops. Ignoring the actual difficulty in completing the repair–phones are small, complicated, fragile and glued shut, making simply opening them up very difficult– we experienced increasing limitations on our abilities to repair, mostly in the form of part availability (or rather, part unavailability). In many cases, the group would have happily repaired a device, but because we could not source a part, repair through us was a non-starter. 

Why is repair so difficult?

Devices are also becoming more complicated as technology moves forward, and as they shrink, devices are also becoming less modular. The most “modular” form of a consumer computer is a full-size desktop, where every part is swappable and interchangeable with other compatible parts. Unfortunately, phones and laptops, largely by necessity of their size, need custom-designed parts that are much less easily interchangeable.

There are benefits that come from a more tightly integrated and customized system as well. By custom-designing a part, you can suit it to fit the exact need of the device that part will be a part of. You sacrifice repairability for better performance and more elegant designs. Without a willingness to move away from a fully modular system, it is unlikely that we would have devices in the form factors we have them today–comparatively miniscule handheld phones, tablets, and even laptops. 

Cynically, companies do also benefit from the control that complicated repairs offer them. If only the company that made the product has the necessary information, diagnostic software, parts, or tools to complete a repair, then customers who need repairs have no choice but to return to that company. And if repair is impossible altogether, the only option is to fully replace that device. 

To be continued next week. Same bat time, same bat blog.

Tinker Yourself: iPhone settings and customizations

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Many of the things I have talked about with my tinkering so far have been inaccessible to people without specific interest or desire and at times specific tools or skills. One thing that is accessible to anyone who has an iPhone are settings that you can employ to activate features and customize your experience. This post will outline several features that you can use to make small tweaks to the experience of using an iPhone. 

 

Accessibility shortcut:

You can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility shortcut

Or search in the settings app: “Accessibility shortcut”

Settings Options for Accessibility Shortcut

Settings Options for Accessibility Shortcut

The accessibility shortcut is intended to toggle accessibility features at the click of a button, the accessibility shortcut can complete an action from the list below by triple clicking on the home button on iPhones with a home button or on the side button on iPhones without a home button.

I have the accessibility shortcut set to “Reduce White Point,” which is useful to darken my phone screen at night, making it less straining on my eyes, but there are many other options you can select to toggle with the Accessibility shortcut. 

 

Back Tap:

You can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap

Similar to the accessibility shortcut, “back tap” offers a variety of different actions which can be completed by tapping on the back of your phone (not a button) two or three times. Different actions can be assigned to two taps or three taps. Unlike the accessibility shortcut, however, you can complete a much greater assortment of actions, not limited to those chosen for accessibility. This includes Shortcuts created in the Shortcuts app (like the ones that open apps I used to customize my home screen)!

 

Back Tap Double Tap

Back Tap Double Tap

 

Back Tap Triple Tap - Shortcuts

Back Tap Triple Tap – Shortcuts

 

I configured this setting to open the control center with two taps and three taps to run a shortcut with three taps. Particularly on larger phones where the Control Center is somewhat inconveniently accessed by swiping down from the right corner, it is nice to be able to tap on the back, rather than adjust your grip to reach the top of the phone.

 

Control Center:

Control Center

Control Center

Speaking of the Control Center. You can add to the buttons at the bottom and access a wider array of options by long-pressing on buttons in Control Center. 

First, to change the buttons in Control Center, you can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Control Center

This will show a menu of the controls you already have set and of controls you can add to the control center. Tap one of the controls you already have to remove it, and tap one that you don’t already have to add it. When you swipe to access Control Center, you will see the new, added options.

There is also a lot of hidden functionality for buttons in the Control Center accessed by long-pressing. For example, long-pressing on the audio button will bring up the album artwork and draggable bar for volume and song progress and long-pressing on the flashlight button lets you adjust the brightness of the flashlight. 

More advanced music player view

More advanced music player view

Flashlight brightness selection

Flashlight brightness selection

There are many ways to tinker without having to make physical changes to a device. I recommend taking advantage of those changes and tinker your devices to make them your own.

The Tinkering of a Fountain Pen to Meet My Exacting Standards

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Sometimes you can’t find or afford a device that fully meets your needs. With a little bit of tinkering, however, you may be able to modify an existing device to meet your specifications. Last week I wrote about making modifications to an off the shelf keyboard with off the shelf parts. This type of tinkering works well for a lot of different projects where all you have to do to make modifications is swap between a variety of different parts with different attributes. In other cases, tinkering requires more extensive and sometimes irreversible modifications. Such was the case with one of the fountain pens I tinkered with. 

The pen in question is called the Opus 88 Koloro, and while I liked its high ink capacity, standard-sized nib that could be easily swapped, and feel in my hand, I found the nib a bit boring, the grip section very slippery, especially during long note taking sessions, and the cap, which required more than two full revolutions to remove, impractical. 

 

An interesting nib

Nib with Architect Grind

Nib with Architect Grind

In a blog post last semester, I wrote about the different types of nib “grinds” as features of tinkerability for fountain pens. One of my favorite grinds is called an architect nib, which has very thin down strokes and very thick cross strokes. While I have begun to grind my own nibs, this one was done by a nibmeister, Kirk Speer. The grind makes the exact same nib much more interesting and fun to write with.

A grippy grip

Sand-papered Grip Section

Sand-papered Grip Section

The stock grip section, which is shiny, textureless plastic, was slippery to hold. To fix this, I used some sandpaper to scratch up the grip section and make it tackier in the hand. I made horizontal circles, perpendicular to the length of the pen, so the rough ridges would create better grip. Though the aesthetic cohesiveness with the rest of the shiny plastic on the pen was all but gone, its usefulness, which is my priority, was improved.

A one twist cap

Ground-down threads

Ground-down threads

The last change I made was to reduce the number of rotations it took to unscrew the cap. To do this, I physically removed about half of the length of threads on the pen barrel. I used a dremel tool to remove the threads, then I smoothed the transition between the threads and grip with the same grit sandpaper I used for the grip. 

 

Concluding thoughts–technique

Some of these modifications do not require a high level of precision; it is hard to over-sand the grip section. But others are very delicate. The two main “subtractive” processes–grinding down a nib and reducing the threads–are permanent. If you go too far and remove too much, there is not much you can do about it. This is a lesson I learned through my own mistakes; it’s very easy to take a look at something, think you know what you need to do, and just keep working at it. By the time you check it again, you’ve irreparably changed it. So it is important to work very slowly and check often. You can see and track the changes on a smaller scale, and adjust before the changes are permanent. 

Many tinkering projects require making permanent changes like I made to this pen. The stakes are higher when the tinkering is irreversible, but when you get it right, the results are rewarding. In addition to the satisfaction of a device that works exactly the way you want it to, you will have the joy of tinkering it yourself.

 

The Tinkering of My Mechanical Keyboard

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While tinkering often means dealing with things that are broken, another important element of tinkering is customizing things that work to impeccably fulfill your purpose. In some circumstances, the best way to make an individually customized device is to design it from your specifications from the outset. (The PC I built is an example of this kind of ground-up tinkering.) But there are many ready-made devices that provide great foundations you can modify to meet your personal expectations. Today, I will focus on an off-the-shelf mechanical keyboard that I tinkered with to make more my own.

Keychron K6 after tinkering (Spoiler alert!)

The Foundation:

I started with a keyboard called the Keychron K6, which has a 65% layout (meaning it has roughly 65% of the number of keys that a normal full-size keyboard would have). Notably missing is a keypad, and the function and media keys are hidden behind the number keys, accessed by pressing “fn1” and “fn2” keys respectively.

I chose this keyboard because it was already assembled with a USB-C connector and the option to connect with a wire or with up to 3 devices over bluetooth. It works with both macOS and Windows (which is good, because I do too) with control and command keys and media key support for both OSes. The keyboard was also relatively easy to modify with hot-swappable keyswitches.

I chose to buy this keyboard because it was a good foundation, but there were still some things I wanted to change to make it more useful and enjoyable to use.

The Changes:

The first change that I made was to the keyswitches. The original switches that came with the keyboard were Gateron Brown switches, which have a light tactile bump, meaning before the switch actuates, it gets harder to push. I replaced them with a smooth linear switch with equal (and smaller overall) resistance that I prefer, Gateron Yellows. To do this, I took off every keycap and every keyswitch from the board, then replaced each Brown keyswitch with a Yellow one. Except for one. 

Gateron Yellow switches and a 150g Black switch on the lighting adjustment key

There is one key on the Keychron K6 dedicated only to changing the RGB lighting effects behind each key. Unfortunately that key is right next to the backspace key, which I seem to press often and without great accuracy, accidentally changing my lighting mode while vigorously deleting text. To get back to my preferred lighting style, I had to press the lighting effects button repeatedly to cycle through about 20 different lighting options. So naturally, I took apart a different Black switch I had on hand and replaced the spring inside it with one that takes 150g of force–more than 3x the force for every other switch–to fully press down. That essentially eliminated my frequent mis-clicks on the lighting mode key, allowing me to conveniently edit my documents without disrupting my preferred keyboard lighting scheme. This is exactly the type of small and seemingly insignificant change that gets to the heart of tinkering. 

150g “Super” Black Switch

When all of the keyswitches were replaced, I also replaced the keycaps on all of the alphabet keys, arrow keys and escape keys with “pudding” keycaps. These have a different, more coarse texture that feels better to type with, and give a cool look to the backlight. I kept the original keycaps on some keys, notably the number keys, which also show the function number and media function (play, pause, volume and brightness up and down, etc.). It is useful to have a reminder of what each of the four different inputs the number keys give are. I think that what I ended up with looks nice, even if its appearance isn’t completely cohesive in every way. 

Multi-function Keys!

The last change was a “band-aid mod” which dampened the sound of the stabilizers on the longer keys by putting a band aid below where they come into contact with the PCB. This made the keytapping noise less distracting to both myself and my family… who aren’t always the most thrilled to hear me clacking away at a keyboard.     

Conclusion:

The changes I made may seem trivial, but to me, they elevated the keyboard from a nice tool to something that fits my preferences and needs and eliminated annoyances. This is important for a tool that I use as often as a keyboard. As small as each of the changes are, they add up to make this keyboard something much better for me that it was before. That is the power of tinkering–making something your own.

Making Do: Repurposing

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Last week I addressed one solution to find usefulness in something broken–salvaging the still functional parts to use in something else. But depending on what goes wrong, it is possible to change the way you use a broken device to take advantage of what does work while avoiding the problems of what doesn’t work.

Through hand-me-downs, tinkering projects (broken laptops) given to me, and my own laptops, I have dealt with a wide variety of laptop problems. In some cases I could repair the laptop myself to either use or give to someone who needed it, but in others the laptop was essentially totaled and completely useless. This post discusses one broken laptop that I was able to give new life, even though it was essentially unrepairable and ended up being no longer exactly a laptop.

One of my biggest splurges and greatest joys in high school was a gaming laptop. Unfortunately, its display stopped working shortly after its warranty expired, likely caused by an expensive-to-repair problem with either the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) or the screen itself. The GPU and its associated parts are a relatively common point of failure in laptops. Opening and closing the hinge puts wear on the cables that lie within the hinges, and laptops often run hot, which is not an ideal environment for any computer component to have a long lifespan. As part of my initial troubleshooting, I powered up the laptop while connected to an external display. Everything showed up as normal on that monitor–the GPU worked and it could even play games just as well as it used to.

The only part that didn’t work was the laptop screen itself, and replacing the screen would cost way more than I wanted to pay to bring the laptop back to life. With this in my mind I decided to attempt a relatively inexpensive repair, replacing a cable connecting the motherboard on the keyboard half of the laptop to the screen. Unfortunately, this did not solve the problem. But while my laptop was essentially useless as a laptop, it was not useless as a computer. Unfortunately, I didn’t need a computer, I needed a laptop, so I got a new laptop, and the broken laptop sat for a couple years essentially untouched, until the COVID-19 lockdown started. With two students taking online classes and parents zooming into work or other things, often simultaneously, we needed more computer workspaces in sonically separate parts of the house. That’s where repurposing comes in.

Attached to power and an external monitor, the laptop was ready to be a computer–keyboard and trackpad included, but I made a few changes to the setup anyway. The first and largest change was removing the screen of the laptop altogether. This made it easier to position and use the laptop without accidentally shutting it off by closing the lid. This also had some of its own drawbacks, primarily that the antennae for the wifi ran along the border of the screen and there was no more webcam. Wired internet, which I intended to use anyway and a USB webcam fixed both of those things. The other change was to use an external mouse and keyboard.

The former laptop has been repurposed into essentially a small desktop. It couldn’t function as a laptop after the screen broke, but it gained new life as a computer with the things that did work. 

Making Do: Salvaging

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The things we use break all the time. More times than not, when something is “broken” only one or two component parts are actually broken. Often, the still usable parts can either be salvaged individually or the functional system repurposed in its entirety. Whenever tinkering with something–be it salvaging, repairing, or repurposing–it is important to have a good understanding of the major components within it and how they fit together both functionally and physically. Depending on what you want to do, the intricacies and even the exact way all of the components work are often irrelevant. You only need to have an understanding to the depth that you want to work, and if you don’t plan to take something apart, you can usually get by with only understanding how it fits in with the rest of the system. 

salvaged switches in a bag

Salvaged switches

Salvaging:

My first mechanical keyboard developed a strange problem after a couple years of use. Generally, the keyboard would work, but occasionally, pressing the “enter” or “K” keys would output a random series of characters. 

Key switch (left) and keycaps (right)

Key switch (left) and keycaps (right)

Before I delve deeper, here is a brief explainer of the major components of a mechanical keyboard. First, is the case that holds all of the following parts. Next, the PCB, or printed circuit board, which holds the keyswitches (the part that actually presses down to signal a keystroke), and a microcontroller which registers each time a key is pressed. Keyswitches are either soldered (basically glued together with melted metal that solidifies when it cools) onto a PCB or “hot-swappable” meaning the PCB has special attachments so the switches can be added/removed without soldering. On top of the keyswitch sits the keycap, which is what you physically touch when pressing down a key. 

Based on my keyboard’s strange behavior, I could pinpoint the source of the error. The key switch only registers a binary state (pressed or not pressed) and does not determine the value of the output. Because there was output when the key was pressed, but not the right character, I knew that the switches were functional and that the PCB must be faulty. The keyboard as a whole was useless to me, but not every part in it was broken. With very limited options to repurpose or repair it, it was time to salvage.

First, I lifted off all the keycaps, which are both easy to remove and compatible with any other keyboard.

Salvaging the keyswitches was quite a bit more involved. The main benefit of a hot-swappable keyboard is that, well, swapping in and out is easy and solder-free. Unfortunately, my keyboard had soldered switches, so to salvage them I had to get out my soldering iron.

 Soldering iron (bottom), solder sucker (right), and PCB (background)

I had a very small amount of experience with soldering before this, but I had never desoldered before. The process of desoldering requires only two tools: a soldering iron and a solder sucker. First, hold the hot soldering iron against the soldered area until it begins to melt, then press the solder sucker against it, and release the plunger to suck up the liquid solder. From there, used wire snippers to trim off the LEDs and a pair of pliers to pull the out. Then, I just had to pull the switches off of the plate, and I had a pile of salvaged switches ready for use on a different keyboard. 

 Top of PCB showing switches and tools

The switches I salvaged are linear Red switches from the well regarded German company Cherry. They normally cost $3.50 for a pack of 10, meaning by salvaging the switches from this 110-key keyboard, I salvaged nearly $40 of fully functional parts ready for use in another project.

Follow up on iPhone Home Screen customization

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Last semester, I posted about the iPhone home screen customization made possible through Widgets and Shortcuts added in iOS 14. The building blocks were there, but the implementation was clunky and lacking in a lot of ways. Among the biggest problems was the lack of availability of widgets for popular apps and the need to open the Shortcuts app every time you want to open up an app using the custom icons. 

Shortly after making that post, I returned my home screen to its original icons and kept the widgets. It was just too clunky to have the Shortcuts app open every single time I opened an app (which of course, is a necessary and frequent action on a phone based on apps.) However, thanks to a small but significant change in Shortcuts, I have now happily returned to a home screen with custom app icons, Shortcuts, and widgets. 

 

Software Updates

In response to the popularity of custom icon creations, Apple changed the way Shortcuts work to open apps. Instead of opening the Shortcuts app as an intermediary between the icon and the app itself, the app is opened directly and a notification is shown across the top. Aside from making the process less visually busy (now using the same animation as opening an app), the notification style makes opening apps from a Shortcut faster.   


Home Screen Changes 

App Icons

I found and downloaded an icon pack of icons with simple images on dark backgrounds. It had icons already made specifically for most of the apps I want on my home screen, and I could fill in the gaps for other apps like Libby, Due, and PCalc with more generic or similar icons. The process of setting up the icons hasn’t changed (since my blog post)[Blog post link].

The one app on my homescreen that is still in its original form is the Messages app because I want to be able to see if I have any unread or unreplied-to texts. The inability to see badge app icons (the little red number at the corner) is now the biggest limitation to custom app icons, but not a dealbreaker for most apps where I don’t use or want them anyway.

Widgets

In addition to the app icons, I use both a Medium and a Small widget stack. My medium stack has a countdown widget to the end of the semester, a widget for my weather app, and a widget for the calendar app. My smaller widget stack has a widget for battery and the music app.

As with anything not fully baked, there is some weirdness, and there are some side effects to having primarily non-original icons on my home screen. I mentioned before the inability to display badge app notifications. It’s also impossible to access the Haptic Touch (long press) shortcuts available on normal apps. There are also occasional bugs where at random, the notification will not show and the app will not respond to touch until it is quit and reopened with the notification from Shortcuts. Despite the downsides and the abnormal behavior, I really enjoy having a home screen that looks completely different from that of any of my friends or my family. And the ability to tinker and set things up the way I want is absolutely worth the inconveniences.