In this series of post I will show what apps I currently have installed on my iPhone. I have tried a lot of apps, and have ended up with a set that is quite stable. My overall organization is divided into screens as follows:
- Most Used Apps – 2 screens
- Chinese and Oriental Languages Apps – 2 screens
- Games
- Artistic/Creative Apps
- Utilities
- Try-out apps
- Digital Clocks…
In this post, I will discuss my most frequently used apps.
Dock
iPhone Dock
In my dock, I have Phone, Mail, and iPod. The stock apps are, of course, some of my most used apps, and the backbone of the whole device. I have chosen to kick Safari from the standard dock, and replace it with Things. I have tried several todo/GTD apps (such as OmniFocus), and have found that Things is the easiest and quickest to use, while staying powerful enough for my needs. It syncs on the local wireless with a desktop client on my laptop.
Screen 1: Most Used Apps
Most Used Apps
This is the home screen, and it contain my most frequently used apps. The top two rows are all apps that shipped with the iPhone. SMS and Calendar I use a lot, and the Camera app is very handy to have in a top corner on the home screen for quick access (you do know that pushing the Home butten takes you back to the first screen, right?). Photos belongs with the Camera, and then the suite of Safari, Maps, Clock and Contacts nicely matches my familiar environment from the laptop mac.
The standard Calculator is very good (especially in landscape mode…), and I have coupled it with the best units converter, Units. Yr.no is a quick, no-frills UI for the Norwegian weather service.
The final row is communication apps. BeejiveIM is “expensive”, but the best IM client, in that it looks good, supports all my services, and keeps the connection while the app is not running, handing you chat messages in email instead (works best with push IMAP, such as my MobileMe email…). TwitterFon I have found is the best, quickest and slickest twitter app, and Brightkite is actually the most convenient for updating my location, i.e. I don’t use the social aspect much, but maybe some day? Colloquy is an IRC client, that perhaps most people these days will find completely foreign and useless…
Screen 2: Frequent Apps “spill over”
Frequent Apps - part deux
The second screen is for apps that are in frequent used, but have “spilled over” from the first screen.
I often find myself browsing the App Store and iTunes on the phone when I am on a wireless connection. So these are nice to have there.
Shopper is a shopping list app, for writing down, and carrying out (mainly grocery) shopping. I have tried a few others, but this is good looking, flexible, and does the job.
Spend Lite is the free/lite edition of Spend, but has enough features for me to track my bus-card usage. This is designed to track expenses in different categories, with either a periodic refill, or manual deposit. The lite only supports daily or weekly cycles; I have no cycles, so…
Line two has my connectivity part 2 apps; Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace Mobile and WordPress. These are all stripped down compared to the websites, but works well for quick checking (haven’t written a blog post on the phone, yet, but…) And, they are free 🙂
The next apps are Keynote Remote and iTunes Remote. Using your phone to control a presentation is always cool, and since I have a set of Airport Express basestations at home with AirShare music streaming, the iTunes Remote gives me control of music around my house.
Then, my most expensive app, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It is comprehensive, and works off-line. Not as well integrated in the operating system as the dictionary on my mac, but…
Next, is the best news/RSS reader, Byline, offering tight integration with Google Reader, and a workable (but slow) off-line mode.
The page is rounded of with MobileFiles, which really is for accessing my MobileMe files, but I use it for storing/syncing files to my phone; WriteRoom, a better Notes with usable font, landscape mode and LAN sharing; and Classics, which is a Delicious Library like ebook reader with high quality visuals, and convenient handling for short stints of reading. It has a select set of public domain books. So in my spare time, I am re-reading “Alice in Wonderland”, “Dracula”, “the Metamorphosis”, “Call of the Wild” etc…
That concludes my list of most used apps. Stay tuned for more specialized apps…
Eclectic Consciousness 