Adam Lisagor

http://adamlisagor.com/

Adam Lisagor has eggs in many baskets, metaphorically speaking, which is to say he went to college. After a career misstep in the film industry, working as a visual effects artist and commercial editor, he branched out into the highly lucrative worlds of podcasting and iPhone development. He does a pseudo-monthly podcast called You Look Nice Today with his friends Merlin Mann and Scott Simpson, and an iPhone app with his partner Cameron Hunt which is called Birdhouse: a notepad for Twitter. In his spare time, which is most of the time, he maintains a site on tumblr called lonelysandwich and consults for such clients as his dog Diggy and the biotech firm Genentech. He is available for speaking engagements and dance recitals.

I keep the top row of apps just as Apple intended: Messages, Calendar, Photos and Camera. I’ve always had a problem with Apple’s choice to use the same color green for Messages (or Text as it was formerly known) as for the Phone app. The iPhone ships with Phone in the left of the Dock, and that used to consistently screw with me because I’d go for one icon, intending to use the other. I wasn’t about to jailbreak and use a different icon, so I could only move Phone so that it’s no longer vertically aligned with Messages. This, and two years with the iPhone have trained the confusion out of me. Also of note, I’m fascinated that Photos and Camera are really two icons for the same app. It makes complete sense, of course. You wouldn’t want to get carried away with multiple icons per app, but one thing that I wish Apple had done with the iPhone 3GS and OS 3 would be to add an additional icon to launch Camera in Video mode rather than Photo mode. Of course, it’s a minor inconvenience to flip the switch once Camera is launched, but I think that the applications (Photo and Video) are different enough that they could warrant two different access points.

I moved Settings up to row 2 because I don’t use it as much, and I like the more frequently-used apps toward the bottom of the Home screen, closer to my thumbs. Then there’s Clock, Maps and Voice Memos. I know the Voice Memos icon gets a lot of crap, and it might seriously damage my reputation to say this out loud, but I don’t mind it at all. I actually quite like it. It’s got the element of HAL 9000 and the classic mic is pretty handsome. Haters, stand down. Of course, Voice Memos is the least-used of all apps on my Home screen and has even caused sync errors, but I like to know it’s there in case I need to record myself whistling or something. It happens.

Row 3, I get custom. Pianist has been where it is since my first iPhone. I certainly don’t use it that often, but it makes me feel warm and comfy to know there’s a keyboard within reach at all times. Is that cheesy? Yeah, it’s cheesy. But if having a keyboard on my Home screen and piano tie around my neck for even the least formal of gatherings is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. Next to it is tumblr, but a Web Clip to the tumblr Dashboard in Safari, not the actual official tumblr iPhone app (which lives on page 2). I like the tumblr iPhone app, but I like the Dashboard in Safari just a little bit better for its access to every feature of the Dashboard, not just the major ones. And I’m on my tumblr Dashboard constantly, almost as much as Twitter.

Then there are my two favorite Twitter clients: Tweetie and Birdfeed. I use them for different purposes, really. When Birdfeed came out, I switched to it as my full-time go-to client, but I still use Tweetie for quick things, like searching, checking recent updates, and looking at images. Birdfeed feels really good to use, so I’ll go to it when I know I’m going to be reading for a while. They are both so wonderful and I want very much for neither of the developers to hate me because both apps are made by wonderful, brilliant people, one of who recently put me up in his apartment for three nights.

Dictionary, I started using because it has a Thesaurus and I need synonyms as often as I need definitions (prior to that, I was using the also-capable Dictionaire). Wikipanion serves my hunger for knowledge, and I have a tiny brain that fills up fairly quickly, so I enjoy having wikipedia close by at all times. Instapaper, I consider a close second as a contender for the best iPhone App in the World, beat out only by Shazam, which I still consider magic and possibly the reason the iPhone was made and possibly developed secretly by Apple itself in order to most efficiently and directly convey the AHA! experience of the iPhone. I have no inside information to back this up, it’s just a theory.

And last, an app near to my heart, an app with what I consider the prettiest icon of them all, an app I spent 5 months developing with my partner Cameron Hunt, Birdhouse. Sure, I swell with pride a little bit every time I see it there on my Home screen. Sure I love to touch it and to stare at it in a dark room because it manages to appear to be three dimensional in a way I’ve never seen in any other app’s icon. Also, it’s a great app. It’s a notepad for Twitter. I use it often. Your readers might enjoy it, too.

Then there’s the Dock. Nothing special there, just the usuals. I enjoy using Safari for looking at sites on the web.