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.

Instacast vs Downcast

I've been a long time fan of Instacast. After discovering an app that let me bypass the anemic functionality of the default iPhone Music app , I was sold pretty much from the start.

As I started learning about some of the less obvious features that were unlocked by long-presses and swipes (often cited as a criticism of the app), I was able to navigate the application quickly and easily. It wasn't hard to "master" the app and get efficient with it and I decided I had found my near-perfect podcasting app, grateful that I could stop worrying about looking for something better.

Listening to the usual podcasts on 5by5, I heard about Downcast. I downloaded it and gave it a shot but really didn't like it that much. The interface didn't seem streamlined and some of the interface elements were clunky. I quickly abandoned it, not regretting the $2 I spent but assured the app wasn't for me.

Then Instacast 2.0 dropped.

To support the developer of the app I've gotten daily use out of for years, I sprung for the $1.99 premium, despite not really needing the features. I assumed a use would present itself eventually (and it did). The price of a good app is often so small, it often boggles the mind that people "take a stand" over a $.99 or $1.99 purchase.

Regardless, I started delving into the new features of Instacast but was not exactly happy with what I saw.

Some of the things I had come to rely on to get things done were missing. Controls that were "hidden" as gestures were now moved, in some cases, to buttons or nested selections. While this may have solved the hidden control criticism, it made things much more inefficient and confusing.

The "long press" that used to start playing the target podcast now produced a list of options. So let me get this straight -- where you once had one "hidden" (or at least "non-obvious") feature, you now have three? And you added another targeted click to reduce efficiency.

I know interface design is hard, especially with such a feature-packed app, but the changes I've encountered so far have made the app worse. Overall, the interface had become much more confusing and more difficult to decipher.

There are also bugs that made their way into the app along with the new features. For example, there are innocuous ones like getting pop up messages in German (I thought I was going crazy when I saw those...) or some really egregious ones like a 30 second skip that takes 3-4 taps to work. One thing that iOS devices have always had over their counterparts is instant response to a user-generated action so when something is unresponsive it is especially jarring.

So, rather than get frustrated by the myriad of intentional and non-intentional issues with Instacast, I turned back to Downcast.

Maybe it was my time away from the app or maybe it was improvements to the overall functionality but I am finding Downcast exceptionally well-equipped to handle my podcast listening tasks.

The interface is sometimes a bit obtuse and I've had a few crashes but overall, it is a solid contender. For now, it has taken over my needs for a podcast app without a hitch and I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm sure Instacast will fix its issues in time but for now, I am going to be using Downcast full time.

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 - February 2012 Edition

It's been remarked that I haven't done a "State of my iPhone Home screen" post in a while. Time flies, I guess. I did a quick look back through my posts and the last time I did one was November so I guess now is as good a time as any to do a renewed assessment of what it takes to make Page One.

If you compare what my Home screen looked like in November to what it looks like today, you'll notice not a lot has changed. I had settled on a pretty solid set of tools and was happy with them. Interestingly, some of the changes were the results of feedback from readers who suggested apps that I'd never heard of. Dialvetica is one of the notable newcomers.

As an aside, there are two potential guest posters who I have been talking to lately about submitting their Home screen reviews for future posts. Hopefully, I will get their masterpieces soon and be able to post them here for your reading pleasure.

Row One

1Password gets more and more important everyday, given how rife with security concerns everyday life has become. It is a secure, go-to app that I use all day, every day. If you don't use it on at least one device, you have no excuse when you get hacked which, face it, will happen at some point. The key is minimizing loss and preventing the hacker's access across more than one website. 1Password's ability to create and store secure websites passwords (and credit card info, secure notes, bank information, wifi passwords, etc.) and then make it easy to use them, makes it as indespensible as a web browser as far as I'm concerned.

I did a post recently about calendar apps for the iPhone and Week Calendar clearly came out on top. I've been using it happily for months and recommend it highly.

Awful gets a lot of use. From somethingawful's game threads to sports threads, it is a great source of info and entertainment. If you're a goon, this might be even better than reading on the web.

The standard iPhone Camera app was made much more useful when iOS 5.0 hit. Having access to the camera from the lock screen made all of the difference for me. Rather than launch third party apps and fumble around with them, often missing the shot I wanted entirely, I just snap in the iPhone app first, then do processing later.

I'll do an in-depth review of photo apps for iOS and Mac later but for now, my main photo processing is Snapseed. It is in a "Photo" folder on page two of my iPhone but it is magnificent for creating great photos.

Row Two

Instacast continues to improve and I use it every day on my drive to work. If you're not listening to Roderick on the Line, you are a dope.

Instagram continues to improve as well. With a slick, new interface and a growing userbase, Instagram has replaced all of the other photo sharing sites for me.

In a way, its a shame that Instagram is as popular as it is but it was an innovation seeking a vacuum and was the best of its breed. The promise of Flickr was squandered by Yahoo! because it really could have been the photo sharing site. If they had managed things better, conceivably it could have enjoyed the level of integration with iOS (and soon OS X Mountain Lion) that Twitter now enjoys and no one would have heard of Instagram.

My ubiquitous Utilities Folder has a few staples in it. Soulver, Goodreader, Path all retain their tenuous stay on my Home screen due to this folder.

Soulver has cemented itself as a great "what if" application. I do worksheets in it to sketch out things like Europe trips, monthly expenses, beer making, etc. Having variable support allows me to define things easily, then use the variables in calculations and change the entire worksheet quickly.

I've written extensively about Goodreader and it is still my swiss-army knife app. Path, despite their recent privacy issues, is still an elegant and well-designed app. I have very few contacts on there though and Google+ gets far more of my time.

GV Mobile+ is still a great Google Mobile application. It is workman-like and gets the job done. It remains on the Home screen because it gets nearly-daily use.

Row Three

The Phone app is on the front page because of Dialvetica. Since Dialvetica is just a dialer (albeit a very good one), I sometimes need to access the normal Phone app to see recent calls or re-dial a conference call number. Essentially, Dialvetica lives on the Home Row for speed, but the Phone app sits on the front page for informational purposes (the "missed call" badge, etc) and intermittent feature access.

Despite the unease I'm feeling about Google and their privacy decisions and commoditization of ... well... "me" (and you), Google+ is still a far better social network choice than fucking Facebook.

The Google+ app, while still anemic and badly designed, still gives me quick access to my Circles, which is about all I can ask for at this point. This despite the fact that it crashes at least every other use. Nice job, Google. It's not like you're doing this on a shoestring, so maybe take the time and read all of the crash logs I've been sending.

Rdio is still awesome. The tethered listening chews up the bandwidth, so I generally play music I've cached locally. Still, that's a pretty wide, constantly-changing selection so no complaints.

I have written entire posts in Nebulous Notes. Given the tight Dropbox integration (and essential TextExpander integration), I can easily switch between my iPhone, iPad and Byword or nvALT on my Mac. Nebulous is stable, feature-rich and well done. High recommended.

Row Four

Tweetbot is so good. I mean really good. It is the best Twitter client on any platform and I love using it. The new version was recently released and added a slew of neat features.

Mail is a sad necessity.

One new item on the Home screen is the Quick Entry for Omnifocus icon. I read about this on the OmniFocus forums a few months ago and the thought intrigued me so I gave it a shot. The Quick Entry button in the OmniFocus interface is pretty fast, but this method saves a tap or two and, unbelievably, is even faster. One tap launches OmniFocus and takes me directly to the Quick Entry screen. It's slick.

Safari is still the best mobile browser.

Home Row

Dialvetica is a new addition to the Home screen. It is an extremely 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. Pretty incredible.

Messages gets even more essential with the newly-announced Messages app for OS X Mountain Lion release. I know it is saving me a lot of text messages but it is the seamlessness that I find the most refreshing.

OmniFocus is something I write rhapsodically about in just about every post. It is the cornerstone of my project management, day-to-day management and life management. It would be very hard to replace.

While I still have a slightly guilty feeling about ditching Beejive for Trillian, Trillian does trump it, feature-wise, and I haven't regretted the decision to stick with Trillian for now. The killer feature for Trillian is the device chat synchronization. If I am chatting at my desk at work and then close the lid on my MacBook Air and go to a meeting, not only do my chats divert to my iPhone but the entire chat from my Air is on my iPhone when I open it up.

Another thing that has been made easier with Trillian is when I get links sent to me on my phone. Instead of opening the link and saving it to Instapaper, now I just open the chat on my Air when I get back to my desk and click the link from the synced chat text.

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So there it is. Another Home screen run down complete. Look for others in the near future and, as always, comments are certainly welcome.

The Podcast List

I have an hour long commute every day so having something besides music to listen to is sometimes welcome. I thought I'd run down some of the podcasts that help make the drive less tedious.

Technology

The Talk Show - this is a show presented by the ubiquitous Dan Benjamin (he runs 5by5.tv) and John Gruber of DaringFireball fame. Lots of good tech business news and interesting discussion about Stanley Kubrick, writing and Apple theorizing.

Back to Work - Dan Benjamin (again) and Merlin Mann swerve from Merlin's insane babble to intense discussion about work, life and how to ask the right questions.

Build and Analyze - Hosted by Marco Arment (and Dan Benjamin), this podcast is a top pick because of Marco's thoughts on development, Apple, technology and coffee.

Hypercritical - John Siracusa is a writer for Ars Technica, author of the legendary OS X reviews (his Lion review weighed in at 19 long pages). He goes pretty far down the developer rabbit hole sometimes but shows like the one he did on the Steve Jobs biography.

Mac Power Users - Hosted by Katie Floyd and David Sparks, this is a podcast that presents a ton of information that is pertinent to my interests. Their workflow posts are among the best podcasts I've ever listened to.

The Critical Path - Horace Dediu is one of the best writers in the business on matters related to the money that flows through the technology space. His views on intuition as it relates to tech prediction and his ideas on the privacy issues brought up with Google and Facebook are spot on.

Tested - Will Smith and Norman Chan (and often Gary Whitta) talk about technology (are you picking up on a theme?). They are funny and entertaining and talk way too fast. I'm also a supporter of the Whiskeymedia network and this podcast was one of the deciding factors in me becoming a member.

Entertainment

Roderick On The Line - How does one describe this podcast? You can say John Roderick from the Long Winters and Merlin Mann (aforementioned) talk on this podcast. You can also say that it is pretty incredible and interesting. I can't really say more than that.

Gaming

Bombcast - Gaming news at its very finest. I love the chemistry these guys have and I have been a fan for years. Plus they're connected industry geeks and have a lot to say about things like thermoses and imaginary games like LincolnForce.

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So that's the list of podcasts in steady rotation. Note the preponderance of 5by5 podcasts -- Dan Benjamin is doing some amazing things over there. He has been collecting some of my favorite tech podcasts under one banner and has put together an impressive array of experts in their given fields. I can't wait to see what else he has in store.

Also, Instacast is a great iOS app to listen to your podcasts. The HD version is great too.