Seems to me that with the imminent release of improved iPhone multitasking, I say improved because it’s always been there, just blocked from developers to protect battery life, it’s time for a live home screen.

One of the criticisms that’s often hurled at the iPhone interface is that it’s fairly poor at providing ‘at a glance’ information. Wake from sleep, for example, gives you time, date, and… that’s it. Unless you count the wallpaper of your pet/child/significant other as information. You need to unlock and dig in to individual apps for meaningful info.

But it seems like an easy fix would be to make all those little app icons work much harder for us by having them react to live info. Weather is an obvious one, it’s an optimistic little icon, suggesting it’s 22 degrees and sunny ALL THE TIME. Well, it’s not, so why doesn’t it tell me that? Facebook tells me the number of new events but no info to let me decide how important those events are, same with mail and messages and any number of social media apps.

What I’d love to see is a kind of mash up of the current iPhone home screen and OS X’s widget dashboard. A configurable area that gives you ‘at a glance’ info about what’s most important to you.

Mine could look something like this:

Easy, I’ve got my latest messages, weather, FB updates & upcoming appointments with just a glance at my phone. Oh, and the time and date too. Now that we’ve got our icons working harder, all that’s left to do is work out how we make them into delicious little cup cakes.