David Chartier

http://davebc.com/

David Chartier is the Chief Media Producer for Agile Web Solutions (the 1Password folks) and a Macworld Contributor. He’s been around the tech writing block, and you can find his previous words at Ars Technica, Wired, TUAW, and Download Squad, where he got his start. David lives in Chicago, IL with his high school sweetheart of a wife and two delightfully intelligent blue heeler mix dogs. David writes about tech, culture, and subtlety at davebc.com, and tweets at @chartier.

Home screen spiel: Like many of my peers, I consider the actual “phone” aspect of my iPhone to be a secondary feature, so I removed that app from the Dock. Since every app and its mother has a built-in browser now, I find that I need Safari less and less, so it got yanked too. My not-so-trusty Earphones with Remote and Mic (“a reliable source” tells me that Microsoft’s branding department got to moonlight on that one) let me control the iPod most of the time, so the only default app that got to stick around in my Dock is Mail. For the sake of muscle memory, I keep Phone, Safari, and iPod in their respective columns on the row just above the Dock. I don’t use most of Apple’s other built-in apps very much either, so I moved some that I use infrequently to the second page (App Store, Google Maps), and the others to the last page to get them entire out of the way.

The other three apps that I keep constantly available in the Dock are 2Do, a non-boring task manager that syncs with iCal and other services, Tumblr, a great client for my favorite blogging service, and Tweetie, a very capable champion of the cut-throat iPhone Twitter client market. I also tied my Home button double-tap to the built-in camera, so I replaced the Camera app with Snapture, which has some handy photo tools and lets you selectively save shots.

Four apps on my home screen are dedicated to reading, especially current events. I’m trying to read more away from my Mac, and that includes books (yes I pre-ordered an iPad Wi-Fi+3G) and politics. Instapaper is a great service (I use the Pro app) for saving stuff to read later, and lots of other apps work with it now; integration is rad. Mobile RSS Pro is a good, fast client for Google Reader, though I echo others’ sentiments in that the service still doesn’t have one or two truly knock-out clients yet.

Evernote, for lack of a better non-marketing elevator pitch, really is a useful “external brain.” I collect shipping addresses, jot down story ideas, and collect links on the Mac client, then have easy OTA access to it all while I’m out. In addition to using 2Do, I use Things to collect more free-form projects and ideas that I don’t necessary need a Push Notification for.

I always keep one or two new or experimental apps on my Home screen. Sometimes it’s a game, but right now it’s Attic and Pastebot. Attic is fun because I’m a music nut and it’s a blast to rediscover albums I haven’t touched in a while. I flipped on iTunes’ “fill this iPhone’s free space with random music” feature, and Attic became even cooler. It’s a truly clever app.

Finally, I’m sure First & 20 readers have heard enough gushing about Pastebot, but that’s just too bad: it’s fantastic. It’s one of those apps which reminds me that we live in the future. I used it to paste my Home screen shot straight into this piece while drafting. It certainly isn’t my most-used app, but as far as the iPhone’s potential, utility, and pure “the wow is now!” factor, I can’t think of many better examples.