Looking back at 2015, pt I

the iPhone homescreen

In the spirit of reflective writing on the previous year, as is popular around this time, I’m writing a series of short lists inspired by last year. This one is the apps that find a special place of honor on my iPhone’s homescreen.

The order of appearance means nothing other than that app somehow landed there. I’m self-surprisingly unfussy about that. Religiously unfussy, now that I think about it…

The apps

Messages, Slack, and Snapchat are my go-to communication channels. I’m a member of at least 10 slack teams, but only three of them make the cut for mobile-sign in. In addition to Stories, Snapchat is for sending money back and forth among my circle.

Calendar is indispensable, as I use it to block out time for getting work done and outlining my ideal day. Gero helps me make the most of those productive block and Clear serves as a kind of running notepad for things I need to action on throughout the day.

iA Writer is my absolute favorite app for writing, even above my trusty text editor. I’ve found Evernote to be losing ground to iA Writer in the notes department, and the iOS notes app is catching my eye lately too. I do most of my writing in markdown (especially on mobile), going so far as to change Tumblr’s composer to use markdown, so I’m not sure Notes would ever entirely beat iA Writer.

Medium, Tumblr, and Digg are where I get most of my non-book reading material. Medium is incredible (obviously *gestures to the surrounding*), and the community is great. I find myself reading and engaging with a lot of ideas on this platform. Tumblr’s community is (has been? Used to be?) incredibly diverse and—frankly—weird. I run into stuff there that I would never find otherwise. Digg has made a reappearance recently, featuring an A+ feed reader that I use to quickly skim and save to Instapaper during downtime.

Instapaper is where I do the bulk of my reading, both on iOS and web. I’ve gotten in a pretty good flow of saving things to Instapaper as I come across them to keep my attention on the problem at hand and then circling back and sorting. I use a couple of handy IFTTT recipes (like this one) to help me keep track of what I read and have folders for steps in my reading and sharing process. Links I want to keep for later but that aren’t reading material (like recipes or reference documents) end up in Raindrop, a great bookmarking app that I discovered during the fall.

I’ve been a pretty avid 1Password user for a while, so this one isn’t going anywhere. I haven’t seen another password and secure note app that took both interface and security quite so seriously. Recently I’ve been testing out their teams solution and it’s a dream. I use it to store server credentials and share them with my team. The action support in iOS is incredible, so many other apps support it natively (Slack, for one), and it also serves as my MFA token generator.

VSCO is my app for editing pictures, which mainly I take with Camera and usually only end up on Instagram (though the VSCO community has bee beckoning to me lately). Instagram got the boot from my homescreen because it was a bit of a distraction and I was able to move Camera once it was available via Control Center. I’ve been trying out Adobe Lightroom (yeah, for iOS!), but the limited presets aren’t as loveable.

With the sudden passing of Rdio, I finally jumped on the Apple Music train, which bumped Music to my homescreen. Though it’s definitely not as lovable as Rdio, I’ve been enjoying it, though I don’t listen to music on my phone as often as I used to—my new car doesn’t have bluetooth, aux inputs, or even a tape deck, so I tend to stick to “the commuter”—one-ear-apple-headphone-podcast-listening. I used to rely on the iOS Podcasts for managing all my podcasts, but ran into some trouble with freezing and insane storage usage problems so I gave Overcast a try about two months ago and stuck with it since. I don’t like that it isn’t integrated with Siri, and it really, really sucks at podcast discovery, but I’ve started using the headset skip shortcuts and share-at-timestamp features recently so I guess that makes up for it.

Swarm is actually on its way off my homescreen. I find myself checking in to places via the Notification Center widget more often than I open the app, especially since I primarily just use Swarm to mark places so I can remember them and push my checkins to a calendar so I remember which, or how many, coffee shops I was at on a given day. The social features are interesting, but not of much value to me since few people in my circle seem to use Swarm or Foursquare.

The final two (Byte and Pillow) are actually only on my homescreen so I don’t forget about them (out of sight, out of mind, right?). Pillow is one of those sleep cycle alarms, which I love, but I need to see it in order to remember to set it—ideally, an app that tracks when I’m sleeping could automatically turn itself on when I go to sleep but I’ll wait. I used Sleep Cycle for a while but changed to Pillow because it’s interface was better. Sleep Cycle is creeping back into my good graces though, so this one might go away again. Byte is… well… it’s Byte. It’s weird and it’s on my homescreen because I think the idea is fascinating.