Mark Ferree - Open Source Web Development

A few months ago I had the horrifying experience of dropping my beloved iPhone into the toilet. After a few weeks of rice baths, contact cleaner, and other attempts at recovery, the phone is working except for the home button.

Those of you who own an iPhone know how important the home button is to the every day use of the phone. Its the only way to exit an application to the home screen, the only way to take a screenshot, the only way to put it in recovery mode, and needed for a lot of other common tasks.

So to make a long story short, I wasn't ready to shell out a big wad of cash for a new phone that looks like its going to become outdated the end of next summer. So here's how I've been living without a home button.

When I first realized I had a broken home button I thought I'd have to turn off the phone every time I needed to switch between applications, but this isn't necessarily true. Most third party applications need a restart but most of the core apple applications can jump from one another with the right tricks.

After you receive a call on the phone you are stuck in apple's phone application. Luckily this app also includes address book entries. By clicking on a persons e-mail address you jump to the mail app, and setting up a website for a contact allows you to jump to Safari.

Once you're in the mail app its pretty easy to jump back to Safari by finding a piece of spam or bacon and clicking one of the ubiquitous links.

Safari is the easiest place to get stuck. I haven't figured out a way to go back to mail, and you have to find a link that is correctly formatted to jump out to google maps.

From google maps the easiest way back into Safari is to do something general search for something like food near your current location. This will almost always pop up a McDonalds or Starbucks with a link to their website.

The above solutions aren't perfect, but it sure beats waiting 2 minutes for your phone to restart between every application.

One thing I've noticed is that I really don't find the need to use many 3rd party apps much any more since I have to commit to that 2 minute restart every time I use one. Apple really was right on in the applications it picked to initially launch the phone with.