This week’s home screen comes from Craig Scott (Twitter) (Website), the developer of iThoughtsHD, the app that finally convinced me to start making mind maps. So Craig, show us your home screen.
What are some of your favorite apps?
iThoughts
From a dog food eating perspective, it’s got to be on my home screen.
Day One
This is a really nicely designed app and a pleasure to use. I use it like a private Facebook. I try to add one entry per day (usually with a photo) to act as a simple diary. What I’d really like, however, is the ability to add a short textual comment to pictures in my standard photo library – then have them sync back to iPhoto etc. Once in iPhoto (or Apple TV) the text comments would appear with the photo in slideshows. There you go Apple – you can have that one for free.
Flashlight
Who would have thought it would be so useful to have a torch with you all the time?
Kindle
I spend a lot of time ferrying my kids to various after school clubs and sitting around waiting for them. Trashy novels help keep me sane. I try to avoid having techie books on my iPhone. Not sure what side of the brain stories use – but it’s different to the logical techie side I use most of the day and it needs exercising!
1Password
The de-facto secure storage app. Not keen on the actual app design, but I love the fact that I can sync it via Dropbox with my Mac version and have access to all my stuff. Previously I used Yojimbo but they wouldn’t support data entry via their iPhone app, so I had to jump ship.
BBC iPlayer (Link not available for US)
On the odd occasion that I get sufficient 3g coverage then I may try to catchup on some TV. I still feel guilty streaming video over 3g even though I don’t have a data cap – it just feels wrong – like I’m using up some finite fossil based resource!?
Which app is your guilty pleasure?
I have two – the first is Reeder. It started out as a time SAVING thing, to reduce the time I spent trawling through my favourite websites. Trouble is, it saved me so much time I decided to include more websites in my list. Google killing their RSS feed thing is probably doing me a favour. My other guilty pleasure is the TED app. I can justify this on the grounds of it being educational – but it sure can eat up an afternoon.
What is the app you are still missing?
I can’t really think of one – but that’s more down to my lack of imagination than anything else. I can still remember arguing with my friend about how pointless it was to put a camera in a phone and how music downloads would never replace CDs. I’m not a great barometer for the future of innovation…
How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?
Sad though it sounds, it’s the first thing I look at in the morning and last thing at night.
What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?
Physically, I guess it’s the camera – it’s the only one I use nowadays. From a software perspective I really appreciate the consistency of the UI and the visceral feeling that the OS and apps strive to achieve by way of animations etc.
If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?
Tricky one since a lot of the things that bug me about Apple are what makes Apple, Apple. However, if I had to pick on one thing then I’d argue that they need to rethink their whole approach to files. They seem to want to remove the whole concept in order to keep it simple for users. Personally I believe that files and folders are a perfectly good ‘metaphor/abstraction’ which also benefit from having real world counterparts understood by everyone. Their current approach (keeping information siloed within apps) is not good – it drains much of the value from that information. It also results in services like iCloud… </rant>
Anything else you’d like to share?
Am I the only person who would like an iPhone5 with an iPhone4 sized screen?
Thanks to David for asking me to do this – it’s been fun.
Thanks Craig.
