ios-icons is a lua module enabling communication with iPhone/iPod/iPad device(s) over usb for the purposes of icon arrangement.
ios.connect returns a connection for read / set operations.
bash# lua
Lua 5.2.3 Copyright (C) 1994-2013 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> ios = require "ios-icons"
> conn = ios.connect()
> icons = conn:get_icons()
conn:get_icons() returns a table model of the current
icons as arranged on device (by page then (icon or group/icon).
> -- how many (springboard) pages do I have?
> print(#icons)
12
as well as the model objects, icons contains a bunch of utility methods,
like flatten, find, visit ...
> -- how many icons do I have overall?
> print(#icons:flatten())
222
The simplest update you can make swaps two icon positions
> print(icons:dock())
pr0nz, Mail, 1Password, Safari
>
> -- wait - err, how'd that get there!
> icons:swap(icons[1][1], icons:find("Messages"))
> conn:set_icons(icons)
>
> print(conn:get_icons()[1])
Messages, Mail, 1Password, Safari
see example_sort and source for more details.
Communication is via usb, using the excellent libimobiledevice and libplist libraries both of which are required to build.
brew install lua --with-completion
brew install luarocks libimobiledevice libplist
luarocks install ios-icons
As well as osx I've tested on ubuntu (14.4) but the install was significantly more complicated due to incompatible libimobiledevice versions in apt.
I can't ascertain the politics or technical details of why libimobiledevice-2 exists, nor where it's source is hosted online but it appears quite incompatible with the version of the lib I've used, and the header files unfortunately conflict.
To work around this I built libimobiledevice, libplist and libusbmuxd from source, installed each with checkinstall. Tread careful if you decide to follow in my footsteps here - I don't use any of the Linux ios tooling so may have broken rhythmbox/syncing/whatever the kids use these days and I wouldn't even know.
I used lua5.2 from apt and build luarocks from source (although I've since forgotten what failure prompted the manual rocks build).