This week’s home screen feature is by Allison Sheridan (twitter), a great friend and the host of the Nosillacast Podcast. Allison also lives in Southern California so we have travelled together to Macworld in the past. My favorite Allison story is how once we were talking about podcasts and I was sharing some of my favorite science and history podcasts with her. Allison looked at me completely deadpan and said, “I don’t listen to any of that stuff. For me, it’s all about the tech.” So let’s take a look at Allison’s home screen.

My most interesting home screen apps include:

11C Scientific
I think it’s fascinating that both Dave Hamilton and I have Reverse Polish Notation (RPN calculators on our home page! My preference is called 11C Scientific, and exact duplicate of the HP 11C calculator I’ve been carrying around since the 1970s.

DVR Remote
DVR Remote lets you type on a normal iPhone keyboard to enter the name of a show you’re trying to tell your TiVo to record. It’s so much fun to use I actually made a YouTube video showing how it works – it makes me giggle every time!

Zenbe Lists
I love Zenbe Lists. You see the iPhone app here but it’s also a website that syncs perfectly with the iPhone app. I make shopping lists, packing lists, Christmas lists, you name it, I put it all in Zenbe lists. I even made a separate Prism application for Zenbe so I can launch it in a snap on my Mac.

But my FAVORITE app is TimeScroller
TimeScroller is a must-have application if you like to, or have to hang out with people all over the globe. There’s no better way to keep track of what time it in different cities, figure out when you can all meet up, and in some cases figure out what day it is in another time zone. I used this constantly to play with my friends on the internets. There’s a Mac application too!

I do have a guilty pleasure and that’s Boomshine
It’s a very simple game, touch on the screen and put down a bubble that hopefully gets hit by the little colored dots floating around, the more you hit before your bubble goes away, the more points you get. I’m pretty sure there is no skill involved at all here but for some reason it makes you think you’re developing a strategy!

You’ll notice I use Simply Tweet as my Twitter client and I like it well enough but the one app I still haven’t found on the iPhone (or the Mac for that matter) that lets me create groups to follow on a separate screen. I follow a lot of people (around 400) so my feed is always interesting but I’d sure like to be able to flip to a group of just my family, or just my podcasting buddies (like MacSparky) and make sure I never miss their tweets. Nambu on the Mac got close but it was buggy and crashed on me whenever I did a direct tweet. Might need to go back and revisit that app since I haven’t tested in a long time. But if anyone knows of an iPhone app that will do groups for me I’d be most appreciative to hear about it!

I use my iPhone pretty much constantly, taking maybe 15 minute breaks from it – but oddly the thing I use the very least is the phone! I’m not saying I don’t appreciate having a phone around from time to time but if I had to give up one thing on my iPhone it would probably be the phone!

Thanks Allison!

Dave Hamilton(twitter) is one of my very favorite self proclaimed nerds. When not playing his drums (he is awesome), Dave, along with John Braun, host the Mac Geek Gab, which is by far the best Mac troubleshooting podcast. Dave also is one of the principals of the outstanding Mac news site, Mac Observer. So today we get to find what is on Dave’s home screen.

What is interesting on your home screen?

Camera Genius (CodeGoo) – For all those “I just want to take a picture now” opportunities. The thing I love the most about it is its “Anti Shake” feature. In a nutshell, it waits until your phone is stable before snapping the picture, so I just click the shutter button, take aim, and as soon as it’s happy it snaps the shot. Love it!

Twittelator Pro (Stone Design) – Andrew Stone did a fantastic job taking this app and completely reworking it last year, bringing it into the forefront of Twitter apps in both design aesthetics and functionality. Unfortunately, the default “Gray” theme is kind of wonky visually so I think many people are still initially turned off. But setting it to “Dove” (white background) or my favorite, “Raven” (black background), really makes the app pop. It does some great things in terms of managing multiple accounts, conversations, retweets, lists and more. And it also lets you customize your favorites bar any way you wish, making it truly personalizable (is that a word? ;-).

Todo (Appigo) – Listen, there’s nothing perfect about managing To Dos on the iPhone, but Appigo’s Todo syncs (over WiFi) with SyncServices on my Mac, allowing me to get close to what I’d want (which is live OTA sync). And it’s got a decent interface for managing/adding To Dos that I then see in BusyCal on my Mac (when SyncServices decides to play nice, which is most of the time).

What is your favorite app?

I’m not sure I have a favorite, per se. In general I spend most of my iPhone time in either Mail or Twittelator Pro.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

See answers to #2 above. 🙂 I can get addicted to information flow pretty quickly, so having email and Twitter access in my pocket is simultaneously fantastic and terrible.

How many screens full of apps do you have?

I have 11 screens and all but one are at least more than half full. Most of the apps, of course, I don’t use often, at all, but there’s no reason to delete them if I only use them just once in a while. Beats re-downloading something if I realize I need an old app for some reason or another.

What is the app you are still missing?

A real calendar app. The lack of To Do support is astounding to me, but that’s not the half of it. The UI for the Calendar app is just terrible. I mean, why bother to have that craptastic monthly view take over my entire screen only so I can’t see more than one line of events at the bottom. I’m beside myself wondering why Apple hasn’t put a side-by-side week (or “multi-day”) view in, either. This app has probably the worst UI that Apple has designed in recent history. It, like iCal, makes me think that no one at Apple actually uses their own products for calendaring.

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

Depends on the day. Some days none, some days more than I care to count.

What is your favorite feature on the iPhone?

How well it fits in my pocket and is basically unnoticeable to me while it’s there. That affords me the ability to simply have the phone with me everywhere, and I think that’s easy to take for granted with a device that has so much power.

If you were Steve Jobs, what would you add to the iPhone?

A frickin’ calendar app!

Anything else you’d like to share?

Did I mention the iPhone sucks at managing calendars and To Dos? Oh, I did? Then I guess we’re done. Thanks!

Thanks Dave!