My iPhone Home Screen: October 2012 Edition

A new phone. A new home screen. A new social network. There have been extensive changes to my home screen with the release of the iPhone 5 and App.net's rise as my favorite (soon to be "only"?) social network. Given the iPhone 5's added screen real estate, I have an extra row of apps to cover so this might take a while to write as well as read so let's not delay things any further.

Row One

1Password has long been a standard on all of my devices. Lately, with all of the hackings and whatnot, it has become one of the most essential. Rotating highly unique passwords is possible because of 1Password's ability to generate them as needed and cut/paste them where needed.

If you don't have 1Password, buy it. If you own it but you're not using it, you're just asking for it. I'll just leave this here... you know who you are.

Calvetica remained on the Home screen for a while but I'm impatient for an expanded view for iPhone 5. Calendaring apps present situations that benefit greatly from increased screen real estate. Since Week Cal was one of the first to jump on the expanded screen, and I had it hidden on the back page, I just swapped the two and I'm pretty happy with it. I forgot how good this app was. Calvetica is on the back page for now and I'll just swap them randomly, I guess...

Awful is still in heavy use to read the SomethingAwful forums. (I hate Reddit so much -- it's the cesspool of a comment section beneath every forum post in the world but in handy forum form.)

Utilities folder
In my Utilities folder, I keep a rotating cast of characters that need more-than-occasional access and aren't accessible through Launch Center Pro (see below). Calendar, Clock, Calculator, Bing, Glassboard, GV Mobile+, Adian, Rivr all live in here. I keep moving ADN clients in and out of this folder but I'll get to App.Net (ADN) in a second.

Row Two

Instacast is back in the mix. I love the other clients I've tried but Instacast is the best fit for how I listen to podcasts. Instacast developers moved quickly to fix the complaints that heavy users like me had after a major release that changed many really good features. After those features made their way back to the app, I returned as well. It's a really good app nowadays.

Fitbit still gets my food and water consumption entered into it every day. It's become habit and the changes in the recent version of the app made it marginally better. At least it didn't make it worse, which is usually my fear after big changes.

Soulver, as Ben Brooks mentioned recently, is a really amazing product. I use it all the time for monthly expenses, working out financial planning for hiring and project management and helping my 12 year old with his algebra homework.

Settings is back on the Home screen, mainly because I use the new iOS 6 "Do Not Disturb" mode fairly often and I wanted it more accessible. If it could be toggled in Launch Center Pro or via the Notifications pull down, it'd be ideal but I'm not holding out hope.

Row Three

Felix is one of the ADN clients on my iPhone. I'm using quite a few right now, testing them out and putting them all through their paces. Felix is fantastic. The "feel" is just right, the look is aesthetically pleasing and usable and, as a 1.0, it was rock solid and stable. I was happily using Felix for about a week but then Netbot hit (yesterday) which turned things upsidedown for me. I continue to get push notifications through Felix and use it about half the time. If a few key changes get made (bookmark sync & gap expansion are the two I have in mind), it may be the client that stays on the front page.

Dark Sky remains the most magical app on my phone. Last Friday, I was working from home and Dark Sky sent me a push notification that rain was going to start in my area soon. I have a fairly long driveway (we moved to a really cool rented farmhouse last year) so I got up and went out to fetch the mail before I ran the risk of getting soaked. On the walk back to the house, sure enough, rain started to fall. Magic.

Harvest for my hours tracking. A necessary evil, I'm afraid.

Nebulous Notes has taken a huge leap in the last version. I use it across iPhone and iPad and it is the best Dropbox-integrated text editor out there. At least for me. It suits all of my needs pretty perfectly including, after some monkeying around, outlining meeting notes. It is an essential app if there ever was one.

Row Four

Netbot is a newcomer but it is a fantastic addition. Helping move ADN from a small, fringe upstart to something a bit more visible, Tapbots released a version of their streaming social network client for ADN and, while it is very similar in form and function to its flagship app, Tweetbot, what it means to people who have been on ADN for a while is significant. I have been buying, downloading and using all of the ADN clients I can get my hands on, not only to support the work of the developers but to see what new things can be done with the fledgling APIs and concepts.

Netbot uses ADN to replicate Twitter and that's not such a bad thing. Twitter's treatment of its longstanding users and developer community has been appalling. I can see, as the network expands, the apps changing to embrace some of its newer functions (annotations, privacy APIs) and grow with the features as they're added. It's a great start. As I've been singing the praises of Tweetbot for some time, I'm happy to see Tapbots on ADN too.

Google+ is still on the front page. I check it once a day but it's a weird mix of Android fans, science news and beer links.

Safari gets a lot more use now that Cloudtabs exist.

Row Five

Drafts has had some fantastic updates since my last post about it (more to come too!). It is my go-to for short text files to keep information handy like parking spots, phone numbers entered on the fly, etc. It's my digital scrap paper with the added ability to shoot these little snippets of text to all sorts of handy places.

OmniFocus is something I write fairly often about. It's about as important as my iPhone at this point.

Sparrow is back! For me anyway. I was using Mail.app for all of my accounts but I have quite a few and it got confusing. Breaking them out and serving my gmail accounts from a sad, deprecated, likely-no-longer-supported app seemed like the marginally right thing to do. Sad. Very sad.

Mail - Yuck. Although, VIPs are a nice feature, I'll admit.

The Dock

Phone - Yes Dialvetica is gone, and has made room for the stock Phone app. I'm sad that Dialvetica no longer seems like it will be getting any support or new versions (last update in December 2011) but Phone gets the job done.

Messages seems to have been fixed from the perspective of iMessage sending things to all of the right devices. Messages on the Macbook Air now seems to work with the advent of Mountain Lion and having a cohesive messaging solution that does what it supposed to do is as surprising as it is handy.

Trillian has only gotten better and better. I use it constantly as I swap from the laptop to the phone, back to the laptop, and so on with each having the same messages completely in sync. It's a staple for me and extremely stable and capable. Highly recommended.

Launch Center Pro keeps adding new Actions for apps and getting more and more useful. I haven't updated my Actions screen for a while but here's what it looks like for now. I'll be changing this soon to integrate some of Nebulous Notes new features and make better use of the screen real estate.

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So there it is. A whirlwind tour of the Home screen. I hope it helps and if you have any questions or comments, drop me line to @jeffhunsberger on app.net or Twitter.

My iPhone Home Screen: June 2012 Edition

The last Home Screen post was back in February and there have been some pretty major changes to how I use my iPhone since then. With starting to use my Fitbit and Aria scale daily, as well as changing how I listen to podcasts, I've had to make some hard changes as to what is staying in easy reach and what gets moved to a nested folder or Launch Center or what gets buried in the back pages.

Row One

1Password remains on the Home screen and continues to get more and more important with each passing day. I've had a few friends see the light on this app recently and all of them sing its praises. If you don't have this application yet, you're putting yourself at risk. I also save a ton of time when having to enter address or credit card information.

What I wrote in my calendar apps post still holds true. Week Calendar is still the best of the bunch.

Awful remains a staple of my forum content consumption. Reading about Diablo3, tattoos or corgis on somethingawful's forums is often insightful (or aggravating). This is a must-have if you're a goon.

The standard iPhone Camera app is now gone from the Home screen and I have replaced it with the Utilities folder. As before, I have some critical apps in there that need to be quickly accessed but aren't needed in just one click.

I started using Harvest to track my time and the app is pretty capable for that task. The app that runs on my Macbook Air runs at 5-8% of my CPU (according to "top -oCPU") which is inexplicable. When I'm not in my office at work or home with my Macbook Air, plugged into a power source, I tend to shut down the Harvest OS X app and use the iPhone version to save laptop battery.

Instagram is in that folder too but since it was purchased by Facebook I've deleted my account. Instead, I created an alias which I basically use to lurk tattoo artist's Instagram accounts since all of the best tattoo artists in the country show their latest work on there.

Google+ recently revamped their iPhone app. The functionality still isn't quite there but it looks fantastic and hasn't crashed nearly as much as the old version. It has a Flipbook vibe too it and I really like what they've done with the interface.

Soulver lives in this folder too and still gets a fair amount of use.

GV Mobile+ sits in this folder too, just so I have it around for easy access or so I can easily see a red badge if I have a message waiting.

Row Two

Instacast has been replaced by Downcast. You can read why here.

The Fitbit app lives on this row as well, which I use all day long to track what I eat and drink. I outlined that whole deal in this post.

Nebulous Notes is still the reigning mid- to long-form text editing champ for me (on iPad too). I still wish it had a full search capability so I could search entire directory contents but, for now, I can rely on crafty naming tricks and using a few other apps to do deep searches. It hasn't been a big enough problem to start exploring other options just yet.

Like before, the standard Phone app is on the front page despite my heavy use of Dialvetica. It's there for the same reasons noted last time -- I need access to recent calls or to re-dial a disconnected conference call number and Dialvetica doesn't provide that functionality. Having this app handy also helps me see if I have a missed call.

Row Three

Tweetbot has gotten a slew of new features since the last one of these posts. If this isn't your favorite Twitter client, your brain is severely broken. Some might be turned off initally by the overhauled and completely custom look of the app, compared to other, more standard apps, but it is the attention to detail that makes this app sing after you use it for a while. I can't see needing or using another Twitter client on iOS. I wish they'd create a Mac client so I can just go "all Tweetbot" and be done with it.

Rdio continues to be a great service. I use it to listen to music in the car or when I'm working. It's a solid app and very stable. I still think this is well worth the $10 a month. Their music selection tends to be pretty great, especially for non-standard fare. They had the new Hot Water Music album Exister and OFF! EPs; they let me stream the new Torche album Harmonicraft and they had all of the Iron Chic albums when I went looking.

Drafts has entered the Home screen scene for me and quickly became an essential app. Lots of folks have been raving about this little piece of software on the internet so I won't bore you with the same thing that's been rattling around the echosphere. Suffice to say the first release was great and the developer just keeps improving it with each new version. I love this app.

Safari is still awesome and I use it a lot.

Row Four

Mail is a sad necessity.

Sparrow is fantastic. Love the interface. Love the app in general. My current workflow is to keep all of my work email in the standard Mail app since that tends to be high priority. The push capabilities of Exchange and Mail.app make it pretty essential. I don't know that Sparrow will ever be a great choice for corporate email. I do hook up all of my personal accounts on it now, however, and I love the experience of using Sparrow. Still, I qualify it as "good for handling personal email". Early on, I kept thinking, "I can't wait until Sparrow gets push notification" but I'm finding I don't miss the fact that I have every email notifying me of its presence the second it arrives.

OmniFocus remains fantastic and essential on every platform.

The Quick Entry for Omnifocus icon has made a return to the Home screen. If you want to implement it, search around on the OmniFocus forums. It's pretty easy to track down (or click the link). It is FAST. One tap launches OmniFocus and takes me directly to the Quick Entry screen. I toyed with using OmniFocus from Launch Center on the Home row, but it was still an extra click and, believe it or not, there are times when it matters.

Home Row

Dialvetica is a fast dialer app for iPhone. I can usually dial contacts in 3-4 taps and that includes turning on the phone, opening Dialvetica and hitting dial. An acquired taste, probably, but I use it daily. It's a cool app.

Messages became a lot less stable with the release of the beta Messages.app for OS X. I still have issues with its stability and features. I turned off all of the Messages accounts on my computers and deleted all evidence of the beta. After that, things quieted down and it has become usable but Apple's entire messaging stack has become quite messy. I'm hoping Mountain Lion can straighten it out, but I don't have high hopes.

Trillian was still an experiment when I wrote the last Home screen review in February. And now, months later, Trillian endures. It's a stable, reliable chat application and the desktop sync now has me spoiled for any other chat client. Highly recommended. I wish they had a native iPad version.

Launch Center remains an experiment. I like the interface but I wish it worked with more apps. I use the Flashlight every night when I take the dog out. Having some of my travel and navigation apps in there keeps them handy but not too handy. I guess after four months, it's probably a staple, right?

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There you go. Another Home screen post in the books. If you have any recommendations, hit me up on Twitter, Google+ or send me an email using the Contact page. Cheers!

The Second Page

I've posted my iPhone Home page a few times and think those posts illustrate the evolving nature of how I use my phone. A few months ago, I had decided that I had too many disparate apps floating around on the pages behind my Home page and decided to come up with a way to organize them that would allow me to find them quickly and easily.

I tend to think of apps by their general function. Writing apps, travel apps, music apps, etc. There are apps that serve specific functional uses that I don't want to see every time I look at my phone. I needed a good method for tucking these apps in a good spot so I could find them and get to them quickly.

By way of example, I had a problem with apps like Weather (or my weapon of choice, My-Cast) being an outlying singleton. I obviously couldn't create a "Weather" folder and put it in there because it was the only app of its type. I eventually realized that I had many of these "Page 2-worthy", singleton apps that had no specific order other than location on the page and I was finding them by a mix of muscle memory and color. I needed to find a new way to organize them.

The layout I decided on was a set of folders organized alphabetically by general context, much like a GTD context. This seems to diverge from what is probably the norm of folder use. Maybe GTD has re-wired my brain, but working with folders like "Helping", "Knowing", "Listening", etc. made a lot of sense.

As you can see, some folders stick with things that are related by a theme like "Finance", which has applications that related to all sorts of money information and manipulation, or "Sports" for sports news or streaming apps (except MLB At Bat which has moved to the Home screen for the regular season).

All "helper" apps find a home in the "Helping" context. This encompasses things like remote desktop apps, Dropbox, Syncopy, iBrewMaster, Ringtone makers, Photoscanning software, etc. As you can see, they run the gamut of ways to help me out, but they all fall into that general bucket of functionality. Using my context folder consolidates them all in one place.

"Knowing" contains any app that allows me to know things, or at least find things out quickly -- weather, contacts, shipping information, reminders, star maps.

"Traveling" is a catch all for things that help me travel (like TomTom), but also contains apps that relate to things I do while traveling (like checking in to Untappd, or Foursquare, or parking my car).

The other context folders follow suit with the idea - things that are loosely related based on a need, rather than a theme.

Anyway, it's not a huge revolution in interface design, but it has definitely helped me find things much faster on my very busy Page 2.

• Launch Center - Note that Launch Center has taken the place of OmniFocus on the Home bar. More on that in another post...

Guest Post: Scott Roberts & his iPhone Home Screen

Scott is a long-time Apple user and was the friend who got me into using MacBooks in the first place. He has an IT-focused job and he uses technology in many parts of his life. Thanks for the contribution, Scott.

Jeff and I discuss useful apps and what we keep on our home screens fairly often. The iPhone app store really needs some smart filtering system so you can hide all the things you don't want to see. For this reason I frequently ask my friends what they keep on their home screen and what apps they use the most often.

Row One

Phone sits in the first spot after being removed from the bottom bar. Realizing I don't make phone calls all that often, but still needing quick access to the phone, it's held this spot ever since.

Jeff has preached the usefulness of 1Password to me for quite a while and a few months ago I made the switch. They also seem to be a sponsor of the 5by5 network quite often. Being able to keep different and complicated passwords by site is totally invaluable.

The base Calendar hooked to Google and exchange currently takes care of what I need.

The Clock scores the fourth spot because I'm always turning alarms on and off. Some more intelligent scheduling of alarm times by either this app, or possibly some other third party could move this off my home page.

Row Two

Camera gets this spot for quick access. Between this and being able to access the camera from the lock screen I'm less likely to miss pictures I want to capture.

With the recent changes to the stock Photos app, I've all but stopped using other photo editing apps I've purchased.

Instagram is the only photo sharing thing I use.

The Utilities Folder contains Settings, Calculator, App Store, and Flashlight. Things shuffle in and out of this grab bag folder. Flashlight was recently added as it ends up getting a lot of use when moving my Apple TV from the living room to another room. It's dark behind those TVs.

Row Three

Maps gets quite a bit of use checking the traffic for my trip home.

Safari gets used quite a bit to look up food allergy information for myself.

Reeder is hands down the best way to keep up with my Google Reader RSS feeds.

Anything that looks worth reading that I don't have time to digest but I want to hang on to goes right into Instapaper for reading later.

Row Four

Dangerous weather plagues my area of the US and TWCMax sees a lot of use all the time. The stock Weather app needs radar, hourly forecast information, and push notifications for warnings.

Instacast is used almost every day on my commute to and from work.

Nebulous has become my go-to note-taking app. Using this with Dropbox keeps me from taking a pad of paper into most meetings these days.

Remote keeps the Apple TV in line. Do what I say little black box!

Home Row

When is Messages not open? Like most people these days, I text more than I talk.

BeejiveIM keeps me connected where Messages leaves off. With the phone in my pocket it seems like I'm always available.

Mail, love it or hate it, it's probably used the most next to Messages.

Tweetbot was quickly purchased and replaced the original Twitter app when the last horrible update came out.

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I'd like to thank Jeff for all the great information he posts about his workflows. Reading his posts helps me analyze how I do or don't manage to get things done.

My iPhone Home Screen (November 2011 edition)

Every once in a while I like to do a post on the current apps I'm using on my iPhone. Generally they are posted to Google+ or a similar service but, since I have this site, these little write-ups will start residing here. I will probably do a subsequent piece for my current iPad homepage soon too.

Row One:

First up is 1Password. I was telling someone just today that I use 1Password all day long. I keep my credit card information in it, web logins, wifi passwords, bank account stuff... whatever. It's super secure and it's installed on all of my devices and Macs.

Agenda is a new addition which I'm not quite sold on yet. It shows your calendar in a list form and you can swipe to switch between a month, week, day, and meeting level view. I am using the Forecast mode in OmniFocus more often lately so Agenda my move to the back page in a week or so.

Awful is an app for viewing the somethingawful forums. Once a goon, always a goon, I guess. It's a great way to read the tons of traffic on the site and sometimes I prefer it to the website.

Camera is a staple. This slot used to be reserved for Camera+ but that moved to my Photography folder on page 2 when iOS5 came out. Getting to the camera app with a double tap from the lock screen changed the game for me. I still use Camera+ for editing photos but not as regularly as I used to.

Row Two:

Instacast is the best podcast app out there. I use this app on my daily commute. It has so many tweakable, configurable settings, you can set it up perfectly for your needs.

In addition to Clock, Calculator, Calendar and Settings in second row folder, TextExpander now finds itself as a first-page app. It took me a while to find a need for it, but once I did, it worked great. As I started finding more and more uses for it, the app is now something that sees constant daily use. I have markdown shortcuts, date and time stamp shortcuts, and email signature shortcuts set up and they're huge timesavers. Even though the snippets are a few characters in length, the Mac version of the software reports that I've saved over an hour of typing time since I bought the app which wasn't too long ago.

Pastebot is an app that lets you share your clipboard between your iPhone and your Mac. It's pretty fantastic to have an app like that when you need it.

Dragon Microphone is a app that serves as your microphone when using the Dragon Dictation application for your Mac. It's buggy but when writing long papers, it's a real life saver.

I downloaded Dragon Dictation when I started messing around with voice transcription. I have yet to open it and use it, but when I do... at least I'll know where to find it. This one might not stay on the front page.

I wrote about Soulver in a recent post. I use it way more than I ever thought I would.

Instagram is an incredible "social media" app. I check it twice a day just to see what new, creative things my friends have cooked up.

Row Three:

GV Mobile+ was the first iPhone app that supported GoogleVoice. When Apple pulled it from the App store, I was disappointed because I had just spent a few bucks on it. Once the application got reinstated, it came with a slew of new features and it is rock solid. Having GoogleVoice as my middleman cuts down on a lot of wasted time talking to people who I generally don't have time or use for.

Google+ is checked daily, sometimes several times a day. I follow a pretty neat mix of scientists, tech folks, friends from various forums etc. and it's a far better, Facebook-free way to do it. If there was a way to kill the red indicator number when people add me, that'd be just fine. As someone who can't stand when there are a lot of badges adorning my apps, having to open up Google+ just to clear that notification bugs me. That just might be a little neurotic.

Rdio, along with iTunes Match, (as previous posted about) is my go-to music application for the iPhone. I tend to cache music rather than stream it, but I noticed that Last.fm doesn't pick up my played music unless I'm in online mode. So now I play cached music in online mode and everything seems to be hunky dory.

Nebulous was recently moved to the first page while I deal with ironing out some problems with my favorite iPhone text editor, Notesy. Recently, I noticed that Notesy was having issues saving some of my changes. While I work out the problems with an extremely-responsive David Findlay, I have jumped back to Nebulous Notes. I've always found Nebulous' interface inscrutable and unintuitive but it supports TextExpander, markdown and Dropbox, which is pretty much the trifecta for me right now. With no ability to search all files in my Dropbox folder, it doesn't really fit in with my general workflow but I'll live with it until I can find a good workaround for my beloved Notesy.

Row Four:

Tweetbot is hand's down the best twitter client on any platform. The improvements since version 1 have been truly staggering and the functionality is first rate.

My favorite feature is how it handles time gaps in your twitter feed. It creates a gap with a button. You click this button to start fetching tweets and if you have the gap in the top half of the screen when the query resolves, the tweets will be added above your current spot and if you have the gap in the lower half of your screen, they will be added below it. The way I use Twitter is to go from the spot in the timeline at which I last read twitter to the most current but scrolling up. This is the first app (and only, that I'm aware of) that works the way, which is remarkable given how I'm sure the way I read Twitter is probably not that common.

I could write a whole post about Tweetbot. One day I'll pull all of the notes I have on it into something coherent (unlike this) where I will likely compare it to playing a video game on your phone, except you're just reading Twitter. Its really a fun app to use and it is one of the most favorite apps on my first page.

Goodreader is a solid PDF viewer, but just saying that is doing it a great injustice. It is basically the Swiss Army knife of the iPhone. It plays mp3 files, saves files locally, allows you to crop a page in a PDF and then read all pages with the same focused cropping, allows for granular security and PDF note-taking and highlighting. It's a remarkable app and a must-own for every iOS user.

Mail always stays on the front page, a necessary evil. I wish I could avoid it more.

Safari underwent some interesting changes in iOS5 but still gets constant use. It is still the best mobile browser out there, by a long stretch, although Android has made some great strides playing catch up (mainly by aping the Apple interface and gestures).

Home Row:

Phone remains front and center. Now if my calls could just stay connected I would be all set...

Messages (now with iMessage!) still gets heavy use. I use it less and less with the advent of good mobile IM clients but it's still a great app with a ton of functionality.

OmniFocus, oh OmniFocus. I'd be lost without you. Since writing my article about using Siri and OmniFocus a few weeks ago, the folks at Omnigroup have added the ability to use Siri and the Reminders app to transfer tasks into OmniFocus. It's a great workaround and I use it all the time. This is the app I use more than anything else on my phone because it's how I stay organized for work and at home.

I use the versions for iPad and my Macbook Air too. While some may find it overkill, it really changed how I did...well... everything. In fact, it's one of the inspirations for this website and its implementation of GTD is the closest to how I think. If you ever find yourself needing to get organized, look no further.

Since the iPhone launched, I've been using and recommending Beejive as the best IM client for iOS. Trillian has taken over that task recently however, which has come as quite a surprise to many of my friends. It came about mainly because I was having issues with my IM client on my Mac and someone recommended I try Trillian. I used to use Trillian on PC years ago and wasn't a huge fan of late, but it was free to download and try so I snagged it for my iPhone and my Macbook Air.

Where Trillian works is that it will sync my chats between devices. If I am talking to someone on my iPhone and leave the chat window open, when I open up my Macbook Air, the conversation will be there. I paid the $10 for the year for access to cloud saving of conversations. This allows me to open links from conversations on my iPhone when I get to my Mac, even if I close the window by accident. It has really proved its worth of late. Add to this the fact that it's stable and works as advertised and I have the feeling it will be on page 1 for a while.

~

Apps rotate out and new apps take their place. As a designer and ex-developer, I love to see what others have done. If you have any suggestions for apps that I might liked based on what you read above, let me know on twitter. My username is "jeffhunsberger".