Home Screens – Dan Fenner


Dan Fenner pays for his shoes as a data specialist. At night, he teaches English to adult immigrants. Dan is pretty passionate about travel and blogs about it at MuchoSpanish.com. Throughout it all, Dan’s relies on his trusty iPhone and iPad. He even uses his iPad as his primary computer. So Dan, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

iPhone: 

Overcast Podcast Player, Audible, Music, OperaVPN, Kindle.

iPad:

Pixelmator and Procreate: I use these for my Instagram images. I bought Pixelmator the day it came out. I just started using Procreate, since I just bought my Baby Pro in October 2016.

PDF Expert: This is my main PDF annotation app, mostly because of its Focus presentation feature. When I trace a box around a section of a document, everything outside the box darkens about 50%, which helps the focus on exactly the part I want them, too. Settings says PDF Expert is using 3.9 GBS of iCloud space.

Coda: I can make CSS changes to different websites that I run. I also like using Coda as my FTP app. I even designed a custom WordPress them in Coda.

Pages: I can design the lessons for my night class very easily and they look great.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

I love spending time in Instagram and YouTube. Sometimes I search photos from places we’ll be traveling to.

What app makes you most productive?

Notes, since I can refer to it for everything in my life, especially now that we can lock them. I store SFTP info and website security questions, I keep to do lists here because I can write notes about the to-do item or take a photo and add it to the note, allowing me to get my head back into the task much more quickly. I love that I can use Siri to remind me about Notes.

What is the app you are still missing?

I don’t feel I’m missing out on any Mac apps, but I wish a lot of these iPad apps were more-fully functional.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I’m on my iPad all day long. My iPad is now my main computer at work. I love it because it’s so light and portable. I can put it down anywhere and start getting some work done.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Outlook (there are some work emails and meetings I can’t miss), Maps Destinations (so easy to get the best route to/from work), Calendar. I’ve also found that Siri App Suggestions has become very good at know what I want at specific times of the day.

What is your favorite feature of the iPad?

My favorite feature is the Pencil.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I would focus on making the iPad a more productive device. Split screen and keyboard shortcuts were a great addition. I look forward to seeing new productivity features this spring.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

Currently, I have an artistic rendition of my beautiful wife that I created on my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

Thanks Dan.