Here is the default behavior of the Home button on your iPad: one click will bring you back to the last Home screen you looked at; if you are not on the first Home screen (the leftmost), a second click will bring you to it. A third click (or a second click, if you were already on the first Home screen) will display the search field / text box, much like pressing Command+Spacebar on Mac OS X to get to Spotlight. You can also double-click on the Home button to go straight to the first Home screen. But you can easily customize what the iPad Home button does, as you'll learn in this tutorial.
Customize the iPad's Home button function
This is how you configure the alternate functionality of the Home button:
Click on the "Home" button, and flick through Home screens until you find the "Settings" icon: then tap on it.- Once the iPad Settings screen loads, tap on the "General" settings on the left (should be automatically selected).
- In the 5th section of preferences, tap on "Home" button (the one on screen).
- The next screen display first the action your iPad should take when you double-click on the Home button:
• "Home" (default, which means that it goes to the first Home screen)
• "Search" (meaning that double-clicking will directly load the search field)
• "iPod" (meaning that a double-click on the Home button will open your the iPod player on your iPad, with your music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.) - The second setting for the Home button concerns iPod playback: if you are watching or listening something on the media player on your iPad, what should a click on the Home button do? By default, ("On"), it will show the "iPod Controls" - this is of course when you are playing something in full screen mode. To turn off this functionality, simply tap on the "iPod Controls" button to set it to "Off".
- (The last setting on this screen lets you determine what search results your iPad should display, and doesn't affect the functionality of the physical Home button.)
Your new Home button settings will take effect immediately, and you can give one click on the Home button to return to what you were doing beforehand; you can change these options at any time by following the steps outlined above.