what's up everyone it's adrian finch welcome back to my channel ios 14 is finally finally here and
in today's video i'm going to show you guys how to create a custom home screen that is both aesthetic
and functional using custom backgrounds custom app icons and widgets and i promise you you
will learn a couple things in this video that you haven't seen in any other videos
so just keep watching it's funny i literally six or eight months ago wrote in my calendar
ios 14 predicted release and i predicted the week it was gonna drop because i wanted to make videos
right away when it came out and literally last wednesday i got on a plane to go to seattle my
first trip since december and right as i board the plane i get an alert that ios 14 just dropped and
i was like oh wanting to scream because i couldn't make a video until i got back so here i am i'm a
couple days late so sorry but i'm here if you guys are new here hello my name is adrian you
guys should subscribe to this channel for more ios 14 videos as well as videos about all things
technology apps hidden features on iphones ipads macbooks how to declutter all sorts of technology
based videos so subscribe and click the bell to be notified every time i post a video like this
alright so obviously with ios 14 there are a lot of new features to unpack i am going
to post another video that's all about all the new features with ios 14 as well as some hidden
features and things you didn't know you could do so stay tuned for that in today's video we're just
going to talk about customizing our home screen so using widgets using shortcuts and making it look
super aesthetic and just the way that you want it to look ios 14 has allowed for us to have
so many different customizable options that i think we all have probably been craving for a long
time and although we have found shortcuts for kind of making these custom in the past here we are
actually able to move around our home screen in new and exciting ways all right so first of all
what's new obviously you can see right away that one of the biggest changes with the home screen
is that we're able to add these widgets if you tap and hold anywhere on your home screen it'll
go to this jiggle mode where you can rearrange things and as you'll notice it's pretty much the
same as before but we do have this kind of bottom bar with all these dots if you click on that and
hold it and drag it you can really look at your pages quickly and if you also just click on it in
general once you'll see this page that allows you to actually edit your pages this is something that
we weren't able to do before and i think this is super nice seeing as now we have probably hundreds
of apps and it'll make cleaning them out a lot easier and organizing them a lot easier as well
so what's really awesome is that you can actually hide certain pages of your phone so if you have a
bunch of folders that you've spent a lot of time you know creating and you don't want them to go
away like these all these folders you can just hide the page if you don't need it right away
you don't need it to be accessible you can just hide it but it'll still be there for when you do
need it as you can see you would just click this check button and then click done and
those pages would be hidden from your home screen so i'm not going to do that right now but i just
think that that is a very cool feature you can easily rearrange entire pages rather than just
one by one with the apps you'll also notice right away that if you scroll all the way over to
the left you have this new thing called an app library and you'll notice that they basically
categorize for you all of your apps you'll see all of these categories and you'll see recently added
and that's because every time you download an app now it'll ask you if you want to add it to your
home screen or if you want to just add it to your app library so that's a way that you can kind of
have them here without just cluttering your home screen and you can figure out how you want to
organize them later so if you click on any one of these big icons it'll take you right to that app
but if you click on this kind of square with the little icons it'll take you to a full list of all
the apps that you've just added so you can see we can do the same for any of these categories
it really opened my mind to how many apps i have and i think this will be a really easy way to
declutter my apps later on because i can kind of see them all at once which is nice so that's how
it categorizes them for you and then if you want to just be looking at an alphabetical list of all
your apps simply pull up or drag down whatever and you will see right here an alphabetical list of
all of your apps and you can also search right here which is super nice so that is your app
library so when it comes to customizing the first thing that i recommend doing is kind of just
cleaning out your app figuring out what stuff you want and don't want on your phone and then
figuring out what stuff you want and don't want on your actual home screen pages so i have not
yet gone through and really cleaned up all of my apps i mostly figured out what kind of aesthetic i
want and how to do it so that i can show you guys but of course i'll come back with more videos on
like how i decided to organize this so now for the most exciting part and probably the bulk of this
video let's get into how to customize your phone to look like this or to look however you guys
want so step number one is in my opinion actually choosing an aesthetic what kind of colors do you
want what kind of look do you want for your phone what i would do is typically go to pinterest and
here i have a board that's actually just aesthetic iphone wallpaper and these are some ones that i've
saved over the months and years honestly so i will actually link this exact board down below but what
i basically just do is usually search aesthetic iphone wallpaper and then if you find one that you
like you can just simply save it to your phone if you need some ideas for different aesthetics that
you could do on your phone you could check out this video that i posted a long time ago where
i actually talked about all these different aesthetics and how to kind of create your
custom home screen for that so let's say we want to use this one you would just push the three dots
download image and there you have it now something that i specifically like to do is once i have
saved that image i like to pull the actual color palette from that image i just used procreate
on my ipad if you don't have an ipad don't worry about it you don't need the colors to be exact but
i do just like to kind of pull from a color scheme so this background that i'm using right now is
basically just like tans and blues and whites and so that's what i figured would be kind of my look
you can also customize a background any way that you want using apps such as canva or pinterest
i've shown you guys in several videos before that one of the easiest ways to customize anything is
really just to pull it up in instagram stories so let's say i just pull up that background and i
want to type some text like literally you can just drag and create whatever you want stars i don't
know that was ugly but you know what i mean so then you can actually just save that image and use
that as background so there are several ways to customize backgrounds one app that i want to show
you guys that i think you'll really love is called glitty and that is how you can actually draw with
glitter on images so you would just like draw a line and then choose what color you want so i
actually used this to make my current background see how it has kind of the sparkly glitter so
i really love that app now once we have a custom background it's time to talk about our widget i'm
going to let you know right now there are so many options for things you can do with widgets that i
am even overwhelmed i don't even know yet exactly the way that i want to lay this out but i think
this front page is a really good example where i can kind of show you everything that's possible
i mean look at how cute and aesthetic this looks yeah all right so the first thing to know is that
if you tap and hold so that you're in jiggle mode and you push this little plus in the upper
left hand corner this is where you can see all the widgets that are available to you that come
with this phone so based on apps that you have downloaded that have widgets they will all show
up here so you obviously have you know calendar photos open table we got maps we got clocks notes
all of these things that kind of come with the phone and it'll show you out of which apps you
have which ones support widgets so you can also go look up like cool widget apps and things like
that and i have two that i'm gonna talk about that are specifically for customizing widgets
um so basically what would happen is anything that you click on you can just choose between a small
widget a medium size widget or a large widget and then you would just click add and it would add to
your screen right here where you can rearrange and move it pretty much wherever you want so
that's where you see what's available to you if you swipe to the right this is where your kind of
command center usually was so as you can see this also has a new look and features widgets as well
but we're not going to talk about that today we're just going to talk about the home screen we'll get
into that later in the other video so the two apps that i'm sure you've seen in other videos so far
that i really love and highly recommend are widget smith and color widget so if we go to widget smith
this is going to allow you to create small medium or large widgets with pretty much anything you
want on it so what you would do let's say we want to make a small one click add small widget click
on it click on the middle to edit it and then it basically gives you all of these options we can
put the time we can put the date a calendar we can choose a photo or a photo album from
our album custom text a blank one this can sync to your calendar reminders uh temperature activity
literally anything so my favorite ones are kind of the notes ones and also i think the reminders
one is really cool as you can see if you wanted to make a photo you would just choose photo and then
click on this and figure out which one you want and then maybe rename this to motivation
save so then what you would do is on your home screen you would tap and hold click the plus
button search for widget smith and then choose the small one add widget and then tap on it and
if you click on date you can actually choose to switch it to motivation two that you just made
and there it is now something else that's really cool that you can do is actually stack
these together so if you just press and hold and stack them on top of each other and push done then
you're actually able to scroll between these two kind of motivational quotes you can also on widget
smith create something that rotates on its own so like every 10 seconds it does it what you would do
for this one is you would click photos in an album and then i recommend just custom creating an album
with like five or six photos that you want it to switch between so then you would click save
and then what it would do is it would actually rotate between photos that are in that album so
i'll probably create kind of a rotating album with this bottom widget that's a picture of me and my
boyfriend i'll probably like have multiple photos and it can just rotate on its own but for now i'm
going to move this back to what it was before which was just one photo there we go i also just
want to point out that you can really customize any widget by just clicking on the custom text
one so let's say we're gonna make a medium one click on it click on it again custom text
so here's where you would type in like anything basically that you want to do list work out
6 pm edit video i don't know i'm just making things up here then you can click the font
that you want let's say this one and then you can click the text color and the background
color so let's say like cream and then let's say we make the font gray you would title it
to do save and then on this page you would tap and hold click the plus type widget smith medium
add widget and you would click on that one to switch it to to do and there you have
it so basically you can create anything that you freaking can imagine it's very very cool
to utilize the widgets two more apps that are super nice are color widgets which is this
app the only thing about this app is that it only allows you to kind of create these like time stamp
calendar situations it allows you to customize them a lot though you just click edit widget
you can create dark light colored with like any of these colors that it has which is really cool
so you would just do the same thing set widget and then you would just add to your home screen from
color widgets which is right here click on the small one add widget but i don't want that one
so yeah and then another one is this motivation app i think that that's really awesome it just
kind of has quotes that rotate through the only thing is it doesn't really fit the theme of the
images that i'm using so i may not keep that one this is the only page so far that i'm really happy
with so the final thing i want to show you guys is how to get these custom app icons if you've
been following me for a while you know that i used to make videos about this a long time ago
before anyone knew you could customize app icon so now i'm happy that everyone has kind of figured
it out and that you're able to do this basically what this is doing is it's utilizing an app called
shortcuts so when you open shortcuts you are basically allowed to set any sort of command
if you want it to open an app like open text messages open instagram you can do that if
you want it to instantly call your mom you can do that so there are a lot of ways you can customize
these but for now what i basically just did was had it open app to all these apps that i had on
my front page a really easy way to do it again would be literally just to go online and google
like instagram logo png aesthetic instagram logo png so as you can see there's kind of all these
options so you can just kind of save an image from the internet like this and use that as your icon
or you can customize them again i customized them on my ipad i just simply drew the logo kind of
freehand but you can also again use instagram for this you know let's say that you want this
to be your background you could then like draw with white a square a circle boom it looks like
an instagram logo and then just save that so once you've made custom icons or you found them
on the internet here is how you actually create a shortcut so you go and type to find the shortcuts
app and then you're going to click the plus in the upper right hand corner to add a new shortcut
where it says add action you're going to click that now if you wanted to just open an app so just
like go to instagram then you're going to click in the search button and type in open app then if
you click this choose button you can just choose which app you want to open so let's just pretend
amazon then you click next you would type amazon click done and then if you see it right here
you click the three dots click the three dots here click on add to home screen type the name
you want and then click on the icon to choose a photo let's just pretend that this is our photo
you can move it around choose add and then you would click on done and it's on your home screen
and there it is and then you can just rearrange it from there now here's the thing about shortcuts
when you click on it it's going to open the shortcut app and then the app so it takes like
a second longer some people are really annoyed by this they don't like that it does this so
one kind of easy fix it'll always still open the shortcuts app but something that you can do to
make it a little bit easier is if you go into your settings and type in reduce motion under
so it's under accessibility reduce motion if you click the toggle on here and then prefer crossfade
transitions you'll notice that it'll do it a lot smoother now so instead of kind of this chunky
movement it'll just really quickly do it which i like so that's the way that i'm going to keep
it now one more trick with shortcuts what i originally had in this daily icon was actually
a folder that included all of these apps as you can see this was my original daily folder so it
had all these apps but i didn't like the way that it looked on my home screen still so i wanted to
create an icon that would actually take me to a full list of those apps so how you do this
on shortcuts is you create a new shortcut you add the action and then you click on scripting
under scripting you're going to want to click choose from menu now here you're going to make a
menu that it's going to prompt you so you would basically type in the apps that you want it to
let you choose from so i'm not going to type all of them but i'm just going to pretend so i wrote
all those apps that were in that folder from there you'll see that they show up down here you're
going to want to click this plus button open app and then this is going to be what you want it to
do when you choose each of those options so choose we're going to search instagram and then see how
it shows up here you want to hold this and drag it to be underneath instagram so that'll prompt
you that when you get that option you will select instagram and it'll then go to instagram so you're
like coding basically here but not quite all the way so then list for the sake of it but you would
do the same thing and then let's just click the three dots add to home screen choose photo
daily choose and then click add now as you see right here it'll take you to this prompt where
you can then select what you want and it'll go to the app that you want so since these were all the
apps that i replaced with custom app icons i'm actually going to tap and hold and click on the
bottom bar and then just go ahead and hide that page because i obviously don't need those apps
i need them on my phone you cannot delete the original app but i don't need them showing
so there we have it are you guys so that is how i customized my home screen i hope you learned
something from this video please subscribe to stay tuned for more ios 14 videos a lot of hidden
features and hacks i literally have an entire list of things that i haven't seen yet in other
videos that i want to share with you guys ways to make your life easier ways to use technology
to your advantage so check that out subscribe and comment down below and let me know how you
plan to organize your home screen and i'll see you guys in my next video love you so much bye
you