Home Screens - Stephen Hackett

Stephen Hackett (Twitter) is one of my favorite bloggers with an eclectic mix of Apple news, tips, and culture at 512 Pixels. Stephen was nice enough to share his home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

Overall, I think my choices are pretty boring. The apps on my home screen are all from widely-used categories. Everyone takes notes, checks the weather and listens to music. I haven’t even changed the position of some of them, like Messages, Calendar and Photos.

That said, the least well-known one (to non-nerds) is probably OmniFocus. My entire life is inside that app.

What is your favorite app?

Camera+ wins this one for me. It is fast, includes some great editing tools and has social sharing built-in. While I use Instagram heavily, the raw speed of this app makes it a great replacement for the built-in Camera app, at least on my iPhone 4.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Currently, it is Instacast. It’s the best podcatcher I’ve tried. I like finding apps that work like Apple-built ones, and this one fits that bill. I listen to a ton of shows, both on the 5by5 and 70Decibels network, of which I am a part.

That said, I’m not sure “guilty pleasure” is a great term. I don’t play games on my iPhone, so Instacast is the closest thing I’ve got, I suppose.

What is the app you are still missing?

I would love a really good WordPress app. I’m begging you, Daniel Jalkut. Begging.

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

I use my iPhone heavily throughout the work day. It’s my podcast machine, so it is usually always plugged in to my truck while driving. During the day, I use it mainly as a phone.

I use my iPad for a very specific set of actions. I love OmniFocus on the iPad, and use it daily. I also enjoy Instapaper and (as plain as it seems) Safari on the tablet as well. These apps see heavy usage in the morning and evenings at home. At work, I use the iPad to review documents and take meeting notes.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I like that there is very little that can (or does) go wrong. If an app is crashy, usually a reboot or re-install will fix it. While I love Mac OS X, iOS is just much simpler to the user.

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

I’d like to see the home screen on the iPhone rotate, like on the iPad. (Oh, and they should fix the deal where icons move around when orientation changes on the iPad.)

Anything else you’d like to share?

A lot of people who seen screenshots of my iPhone or iPad wonder why I don’t have Simplenote handy. While I do like the service — and used it for a long time — I now use PlainText on iOS, which syncs via Dropbox. On the Mac, I use nvALT, again syncing with Dropbox. I love plain text files, and Dropbox (of course) handles them very well. I simplified, and Simplenote didn’t make the cut.

Thanks Stephen.

To read about more home screens, clicky here