Sharing Home screens seems to have become all the rage recently, whether it ‘s the type of innovative layout available to jailbreakers using the likes of Orbit or Pogoplank, as showcased on this site recently, or the likes of Appsfire, which allows people such as Robert Scoble or our very own Patrick Jordan to share their favourite apps.
Worth checking out is the slickly designed First&20 website, which describes itself as ‘a collection of Home screens of some of the best and brightest developers, designers and tech writers. ‘ Their justification for focusing solely on the first Home screen is that people tend to include their most used apps there so they can access them easily and quickly.
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The site features the likes of John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Marco Arment, lead developer of Tumblr/creator of Instapaper. But while I made a few new discoveries on the site, there isn ‘t a massive amount of variation, perhaps because most of the Home screen is usually taken up with native apps and there are clearly some leaders in each category, whether it be Things for productivity or Tweetie for Twitter. There ‘s obviously an aesthetic that ‘s shared by most of those featured on the site, a lot of whom seem to be designers themselves “ it ‘s simple, nicely designed apps (with attractive icons) with highly-focused functionality that are at the top of the list.
Plus they obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter, with Tweetie & Birdfeed at the top of the list of apps, and Things, Instapaper and Facebook making up the rest of the top five (presumably most have upgraded to Tweetie 2 by now).
As a newbie contributor who is yet to jailbreak I guess sharing my Homescreen (pictured above) with you is as good an introduction as any, though it ‘s not really representative of the range of third-party apps I use either as it includes mostly native apps and some unsurprising mainstays.
I ‘m now using Simplenote for making text notes instead of the native notes app because of the web syncing capability, though Evernote still gets some use for images and accessing weblinks that i ‘ve bookmarked on my Macbook. I prefer Appigo Todo to Things because it has a few more options and doesn ‘t require a paid for desktop app, though I may well change my mind as I ‘m a bit of a productivity tools addict (and judging by the amount of undone tasks, I still have a lot to learn!). And despite everyone else ‘s love for NetNewsWire 2.0, I find that syncing takes far too long and still prefer the google reader web app for when I have a spare minute to catch up on my favourite blogs.
Of course the idea behind First&20 is not entirely original, as Appsfire has allowed people to share their favourite apps for some time now. With Appsfire you can either download a programme which picks up what apps you ‘re using and uploads the icons to the web for you to share how you wish, or you can enter them manually or via a url. Whilst it may not be quite as pretty as First&20, it ‘s a very useful, way to share and find apps “ possibly more so because it doesn ‘t just feature what ‘s on your home screen, and there are no boring old native apps included.
All in all, I would say either sharing the Home screen or just a list of apps as with Appsfire says more about the user of the phone than the quality of the apps selected “ which is probably what makes it so fascinating.
*** All apps mentioned were independently purchased by the post author in the iPhone App Store. For further information regarding our site ‘s review policies, please see the ‘About ‘ page.
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