What’s in a home screen? From what I can tell, the first screen of an iPhone often represents the owner’s priorities better than they can describe.
The first screen of my iPhone doesn’t change very often. Occasionally I’ll try out a new app or two but it’s mostly static. But bigger screens mean more options. Here are some things I think I know about myself from my homescreen.
This is the first time in quite awhile that I can have a blue background on my iPhone.
If you follow me on Twitter or Pinboard you may know that I’m a pretty big craft beer nerd. I have a rather large cellar of rare and varied beer and I love checking out what’s evolving in the market. I found a kindred spirit in Jeff Hunsberger and we made an app for beer nerds and we’re calling it TapCellar.1
There were a few key principles behind the design of TapCellar and I think these are what set the app apart from most other beer apps I’ve used.
You really have to go out of your way if you want to use a bad concept mapping application for iOS. It’s a pretty great time to be a mapping nerd.
MindNode 3.5 is out with a bunch of great features. Not only does it now support the grande phones, it’s received some serious redesign for the pickers and controls. The Font options are just crazy in this version. There are so many fonts available (including downloadable options) that they added a search bar to find the one you want.
Give me a good concept mapping app and I’ll keep myself busy for hours. iThoughts just added a really nice way to create attractive rainbow colored maps and I think it’s great.
That’s pretty cool. You can set the start color and let it make something great for you based on the chosen color palette or tweak the “Range” and get a variety of tones based on the number of nodes to color.
Phillip Gruneich has a very nice script for Drafts. It enables Natural Language dates in one of the best quick note actioning applications for iOS. He does nice work and is a big fan of URL scheme actions for iOS.
Unless you’ve been locked in a doomsday cult bunker you’ve probably noticed that the beloved iOS text editor and action app Drafts received a big update. The obvious part of the update is the redesign for iOS 8 and the new action creation process. The second most obvious thing is the iCloud based storage and syncing. But the real meat of this update is the extra keyboard row and the new JavaScript actions.
Who’s not a fan of animated GIFs? But it’s a pain to collect, organize and get easy access to a URL when you need a cheeky reply to something benign on the Internet.
I’ve been a very happy customer of both CloudApp and Droplr in the past. But I always felt like I wanted to own and control more of how I shared images, text and files. I have my own server through Webfaction and I’m familiar enough with using S3 that I’ve used it for sharing trivial stuff in the past.
When I was eleven, I had a “beach cruiser.” It was a steel and chrome behemoth of a bicycle. It was two times too big for me and I’m pretty sure it weighed more than my mom’s Datsun. But, I road that behemoth five miles every day to a great fishing pond. That bike held two fishing poles, a tackle box, a lunch pail and a boombox.1 The ride up the hill was torture but the ride back home was like a two-wheel limo.
I’ve always really liked Pinswift as an iOS Pinboard client. It was the first client to support full text searching for archive accounts and the design is interesting and useful.
The 1.3 update brings several welcome enhancements and support for the new iPhones. My favorite new feature is the smart title and description generation for new bookmarks. When adding a new bookmark from a link, Pinswift intelligently generates the title (like many Pinboard apps) as well as a succinct description.
Allen Pike on the current nightmare of the iOS shift key:
So, I filed another Radar. Perhaps, with time, they can find it in their hearts to make a change. A change to the shift key - the most important issue of our time.
Seriously, this has to be something that’s been reviewed internally and given the thumbs up. As Allen points out, it’s not like the confusion is a secret or people just forget they hit the key.
