Adam Engst

http://www.tidbits.com

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS, one of the oldest and most-respected Internet-based newsletters, distributed weekly to tens of thousands of readers. He has written numerous technical books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles - thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld.

Phone: Although I don’t use the phone much, I’ve left Phone on the home row because it’s my only phone number - I ported my landline to it as a way of justifying the iPhone’s monthly cost. With three days left in this month, I’ve used only 78 minutes out of the 700 that my wife and I share via our family plan, and I’ve saved up nearly 3,000 rollover minutes. If only they were redeemable for credits in the iTunes Store!

iPod: I seldom listen to music on the iPhone, since I hate earbuds and far prefer the decent speakers attached to my Mac. However, I listen to podcasts (On the Media, Planet Money, This American Life, Radio Lab) whenever I’m driving (via the car stereo) or doing yardwork (with the cursed earbuds), and sometimes when cooking dinner (via a Griffin Technology AirCurve acoustic amplifier).

Clock: I love Clock, and I use it multiple times every day. It’s my alarm clock for getting up in the morning, and other carefully scheduled alarms remind me when it’s time to go running, when I need to pick my son up at school, and when I should leave to fetch him from his fencing lesson. I also use the timer when cooking, since it alerts me even if I’ve become distracted and wandered away from the kitchen.

WeatherBug Elite: The only third-party app on my home row, WeatherBug gets use every day. As a runner, and as someone who grew up on a farm where the weather really mattered to our livelihood, I care deeply about the weather around me. WeatherBug’s combination of full-text forecasts (icons are worthless for weather forecasts, which often change throughout the day) and constantly updated and animated radar maps make it my weather app of choice.

App descriptions from the top-left:

Settings: Since the iPhone is my alarm clock, I plug it in by my bed every night, and the GSM interference with the elderly iPod and speakers through which we play audiobooks as we go to sleep is a problem. (And yes, I know I could play the audiobooks through the iPhone too, but the old iPod works fine and has no other purpose in life.) To eliminate all GSM interference, along with the possibility of being woken up by a call or, more likely, a Boxcar-generated push notification of a Twitter message, I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode every night, which requires easy access to the Settings app.

Photos: Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why Photos is still on the home screen. I suspect it would be heartbroken if I separated it from Camera.

Camera: With the improved camera in the iPhone 3GS, I’ve found myself using the Camera app more and more. It’s nowhere near as good as my Canon PowerShot 870SD, but all too often, I don’t have the Canon with me, and the iPhone is good enough.

Calendar: Since both my wife and I work from home, we don’t have truly complex schedules, but when you add up all the usual doctor appointments and dinners with friends and everything our 10-year-old son does, having access to our shared calendar is important. Shared? Oh yes, on the Mac we use BusyCal to share calendars properly since Apple doesn’t seem to understand the concept of sharing (as opposed to showing) with iCal.

Dropbox: We’ve become Dropbox addicts on the Mac for sharing files with each other and with our Take Control authors, so when Dropbox released a free iPhone app, I jumped on the download. It’s not in constant use, but when I want to look at something in one of our many ebooks, I know that the Dropbox app will give me quick access to all the titles I’ve put in the appropriate shared folder.

Stanza: In an attempt to compare the act of reading on the iPhone, the original Kindle, and the Kindle DX, I downloaded some old science fiction books from the Baen Free Library (thanks, folks!). I used Stanza on the iPhone to read them, and you know, it was totally fine. As with the camera, it wasn’t the best reading experience ever, but it was there when I wanted to read for a little while, more so than the Kindles, and it had pros and cons over both the Kindles and paper books. Nowadays, my usage goes in fits and spurts; I use Stanza a lot when I’m reading something electronic, and then not at all for weeks or months as I read something in print.

Instapaper: Some people play games when killing time in waiting rooms, I read. And specifically, I read stuff that I didn’t have time to read while doing my real work and saved to read later in Instapaper. And even better, since it caches the data, it works even if the lack of connectivity is preventing me from reading something more pressing, like my email.

TCoMobileMe: We’re just starting to publish our Take Control ebooks in the App Store, or rather, our friends at O’Reilly are doing it for us. This is our first title, and it’s on the home screen because I’ve been looking at it a lot as we think about how our ebooks should be converted into iPhone apps and what, if anything, we should change about our process to facilitate that.

Epicurious: I’m a fairly serious cook, at least as judged by my Twitter peers, and this is my favorite recipe app so far. It has decent searching, a good recipe layout, and a massive database of recipes from good magazines (as opposed to the truly random recipes on some Web sites).

Navigon: I’m in the middle of testing CoPilot, Navigon’s MobileNavigator, and Ndrive, and while I haven’t yet picked a winner, Navigon is currently getting the most testing. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with these car navigation GPS apps - the first couple I tried were fairly weak, but the second crop are nearly as good as the standalone GPS devices from Garmin and Magellan.

AppGmail: I’ve become a big fan of Gmail and its Web interface, so this little app, which encapsulates Gmail, rather than requiring me to use Safari, provides just a bit more screen real estate by eliminating Safari’s controls. Gmail via its Web interface is far better than Mail on the iPhone, which is at least five screens to the right.

Twitterrific: I know there’s serious competition between the iPhone Twitter clients, but Twitterrific seems to do all I want, so I haven’t had the energy to try out any of the other major contenders. I’d like to mention Boxcar here too, since although there’s no need to put it on the home screen, its push notifications of @ mentions and direct messages is extremely important to me, since I’m utterly offended at the cost of SMS text messages. I can’t even find Apple’s Messages app on my iPhone.

AIM: Mostly I do instant messaging on my Mac, but when I’m out and about, or if I need to be cooking dinner while work is being done on the server, or something like that, I like having the AIM app readily available.

Wikipanion: With an intellectually curious 10-year-old in the house, I use Wikipanion constantly, since dinner table conversations often verge into subjects where my knowledge isn’t as deep as it could be. Recent searches have answered the questions of whether giraffes are related to horses (no), whether cyclamens are edible (yes), how large the populations of several nearby upstate NY cites are, who was competing with the Wright brothers in the race to create a heavier-than-air aircraft, and how you make Welsh cakes. And no, extreme accuracy doesn’t generally matter in these areas - the Wikipedia articles are just informing conversation over a meal.

Google: At this point, I have a fairly good sense of what I can find (or should even bother looking for) in Wikipedia, and for everything else, I use the Google app. Although it can do voice searching, I almost never use that feature, because it’s often socially awkward to be talking at my iPhone with other people present.

Safari: Last, but certainly not least, is Safari. Despite Apple’s excellent work in providing a full-featured Web browser on the iPhone, I still find Web browsing on the iPhone to be quite awkward. It’s impressive that the bear is dancing, but it’s still not Swan Lake. Nevertheless, since I use the iPhone largely to retrieve information that’s relevant to whatever location or conversational context I’m in, I’m glad that Safari is as good as it is.