Many of us hate the Newsstand application because we simply don’t have a use for it. Albeit we dislike it, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. If you want to hide the icon from your home screen, iOS developer Filippo Bigarella has released a free tool for Mac OS X called Stiflestand that allows you to hide the Newsstand application from your home screen with the click of a button.
As shown above, the application will detect when you have connected your iOS device. In this case, our iPod touch was recognized. If you used an iPhone, it would say iPhone and if you used an iPad, it would say iPad. This application will work with any iOS 5 or newer device that has Newsstand on the home screen and you don’t even have to be jailbroken for it to work!
Once you connect your device, you can click on the “Hide Newsstand” button for the application to work its magic. Once you finish, the application will say, “Done” as it does in the screenshot below:
Newsstand is now hidden from the home screen on your iOS device. If you check on the home screen of your device, you will notice that the application has created a new folder on your home screen called “Magic,” which contains nothing at first sight:
You can drag any of your applications into the folder and you will notice that the first space is blank. This is because Newsstand is in the folder:
When you open the folder, you will see Newsstand hidden away inside.
You can reverse what the application has done at any time you want to by simply dragging the Newsstand application out of the folder and back onto your home screen. When you do this, you can also remove any application icons you added to the Magic folder and the folder will disappear.
It’s important to note that you cannot launch the Newsstand application while it is located within the folder because it will just crash. Newsstand was never meant to be placed in a folder (since it uses its own folder view when you open it), so it doesn’t know how to open in that environment. As soon as you drag it back to the home screen, you can launch it normally again.
Stiflestand isn’t exactly the “perfect” remedy for getting rid of Newsstand, but at least it gets the icon out of our way on the home screen so we can hide it in a folder were we place most of our other hardly-used applications. There are jailbreak tweaks that can hide the Newsstand application outright, but Stiflestand's highlight is that it works on non-jailbroken devices as well as jailbroken devices. Try it out; you can download Stiflestand from this link.
UPDATE: If you're a windows user, you can now use StifleStand. Check out our post!
UPDATE 2: Filippo Bigarella has released StilfeStand version 1.0.2 with better error handling. The Windows version is also now available from Filippo's Web site.
UPDATE 3: If you're still having problems getting StifleStand to work, Filippo has Tweeted StifleStand 1.0.3, which should work. You can try it from this link.
Sources: Filippo Bigarella
Thanks for the tip thazsar!
Reply
