JeffKirvin.net

Okay, I’ve been using Apple’s mobile OS, first on an iPod touch, then on an iPhone, for a few weeks now, and I’ve noticed that my “tin­ker­ing phase” is draw­ing to a close. I’ve set­tled in on a com­fort­able order of apps on my home­screens, and fig­ured out which of the var­i­ous apps I’ve tried out works best for me. So I thought it might be use­ful to go over what I’m using on my iPhone and why.

There’s no one “right” way to orga­nize apps on the iPhone’s home­screens. Ini­tially, I tried to orga­nize them by cat­e­gory or type: PIM stuff on the first page, media on the sec­ond, util­i­ties on the third and so on. But over time this became cum­ber­some as I’d have too many apps for one page and not enough for another. So now, I just keep things orga­nized by fre­quency of use, most used apps on the first page and descend­ing from there. But first, let’s look at the Dock, since it’s on every screen.

These are my four most used applications.

• Action Lists won out over a very tightly packed field of con­tenders in GTD task man­age­ment apps that can sync to Toodledo.com. I like it because it’s quick, sim­ple, syncs auto­mat­i­cally and pro­vides a zen-​like no-​frills imple­men­ta­tion of David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done method­ol­ogy. It’s a lit­tle pricier than the other task apps for the iPhone (other than the absurdly over­priced Life Bal­ance) but it’s worth it.
• Twit­te­la­tor Pro also had to fight some very capa­ble com­pe­ti­tion to win its spot on the Dock. In the end I picked it over Tweetie or Twit­terific Pro because Twit­te­la­tor Pro has more fea­tures than the eas­ier to use Twit­ter clients and is eas­ier to use than Twit­ter clients that match it on fea­tures. I par­tic­u­larly like the abil­ity to cre­ate sub­groups of tweeps à la Tweet­Deck on big computers.
• eReader, in my opin­ion, has no peers. Stanza and Kin­dle are nice (and may soon be the same thing), but I have hun­dreds of eReader titles I’ve pur­chased over the years on my book­shelf. I’ve been buy­ing from eReader since they were Peanut Press in 1997, and wouldn’t have moved to the iPhone if they hadn’t had an eReader client. Even bet­ter, the iPhone ver­sion is prob­a­bly the best ver­sion of eReader for any plat­form, includ­ing the abil­ity to bulk down­load my entire book­shelf. So now I have every­thing I’ve ever bought from Fic­tion­wise and eReader every­where I go.
• Ever­note was my other MUST HAVE soft­ware. I use Ever­note for, well, every­thing, with thou­sands of notes in my data­base. I write my drafts in Ever­note, I keep my photo col­lec­tion in Ever­note, I use the phone’s cam­era to “scan” doc­u­ments into Ever­note, where they’re auto­mat­i­cally OCRed for search­ing on their con­tents. And I’m happy to say that the iPhone’s Ever­note client is another best of breed, with even the abil­ity to cache favorite notes on the device so you can always get to them even if you lose net­work signal.

Next up, my pri­mary screen. I’m not going to cover every app on here, because, well, bor­ing, but I’ll hit the high­lights. These are the apps I use a lot or want to get to quickly, as you can hit the home but­ton from any home­screen and jump back to screen 1.

I tend to arrange things by rows. Across the top are my mes­sag­ing or noti­fi­ca­tion apps, things that show counts on their app badges (like the five unread emails shown here). Byline is a great RSS reader that syncs auto­mat­i­cally with Google Reader, includ­ing starred and shared items.

The sec­ond row are mostly web items, stuff to look for. In addi­tion to Google, we also have loca­tion search and media search.

The third row are things I need quick access to but don’t fit any par­tic­u­lar theme. Speed­Box is an excel­lent GPS-​based speedometer/​odometer which replaces the shorted-​out instru­ment clus­ter in my car, and Ambiance is a great med­i­ta­tion aid that plays loops of ambi­ent sounds with an optional timer. I like play­ing a bin­au­ral tone designed to shift your brain­waves into a REM-​like state with a gong alarm after 20 minutes.

The last row are daily liv­ing apps, cal­en­dar, shop­ping list, logs for food, exer­cise and blood pres­sure. I think of this as the “take care of myself” row.

The sec­ondary screen is filled with things I use less fre­quently, but still a lot. You see IMDB and movie ticket apps on the top row, games and video on the sec­ond, GPS-​based search apps on the third (Have2P is a life-​saver) and social media clients on the fourth.

The ter­tiary screen is where things start to get scat­tered, because while these are rarely used, when I need them I want to get to them rel­a­tively quickly. Some of these, like Pal­ringo and CraigSearch, I haven’t even opened yet. Nota­bles on this page are Ama­zon, AT&T myWire­less, Word­Press and MotionX GPS. Cam­era and Pho­tos are here because I use Ever­note for most of my pic­ture tak­ing and organizing.

The qua­ter­nary (yes, it’s a word, look it up) page is even more scat­tered, stuff I almost never use but like to have avail­able. Here we have a band­width tester, copy of the US Con­sti­tu­tion, an app to actively can­cel out back­ground noise and ebook read­ers. Dice­Shaker is pretty cool if you’re a pen&paper gamer.

And finally we have the quinary page, mostly stuff I’m try­ing out or stock apps I can’t hide or get rid of. I pre­fer using the Weather Chan­nel app on the pri­mary page for weather, so the stock Yahoo-​based weather app gets dumped here, etc. I’ll prob­a­bly move iOwn to the ter­tiary page at some point, as I’m just now get­ting into cat­a­logu­ing and orga­niz­ing my stuff.

So that’s it, what’s on my iPhone and why. What do you have on your iPhone? Am I miss­ing any gems?