iPhone iPhone Home Screen
Harold Emsheimer

Harold Emsheimer

http://overcommittedapps.com

Harold Emsheimer is the designer behind Overcommitted, makers of iPhone OS applications like Ember, Tripmix and Skitzy. He lives in California with his wife and three kids.

My home screen stays pretty consistent with the exception of one or two spots that I use as a revolving door for my newest favorite app. The top row and dock are pretty standard. I’ve got the double-click-on-home-button gesture assigned to open the Camera app.

Clock: I work remotely most of the time, but when I have to head into the office I set this baby to 4am to beat the traffic to SF.

Tipulator: I used to wait tables in college and since then have always tried to tip well. Tipulator helps keep me on track. I notice when I pull this out the waiter normally cracks a smile.

Groceries: Somehow between my house and the grocery store stuff falls out of my brain. Groceries helps me come home looking like a super star.

Gowalla: I’ve caught the Gowalla bug. It’s one of my new favorites. It continues to get better with each release, I find it super useful to discover new places through friends. My kids love the scavenger hunt aspect of it.

Things & Evernote: These help keep my life in order. Between them, I know what I need to work on next.

TomTom: You have no idea how much I need this.

Instapaper:
Probably my most used app. I personally hate reading on a computer screen. I used to print out everything I wanted to read. Instapaper + iPhone changed all that. Thanks to Marco, Tree’s around the world rejoice.

Reeder: This spot rotates my favorite RSS reader. Right now that’s Reeder. It’s fast, simple and plays nice with Instapaper (a must).

Tweetie: I won’t bore you with another haiku praising Tweetie, you know it’s good. In fact you probably already have it.

Tripmix: This is our app to play a road trip mix with a single click. I use it all the time. Randomly chooses an artist and plays 3 songs
before moving onto the next. We wrapped it up nicely in retro interface. In fact, Tripmix is being featured in the App Store this week under New and Noteworthy.

Ember: Another app by Overcommitted. It’s a client to use with 37signals’ group chat service, Campfire. We’re a remote team so we live in Campfire all day long.  We built Ember for ourselves first, but other’s seem to find it quite useful.

Apps I use often that didn’t make the home screen cut: TouchPad, Brushes, Ego, Hipstamatic, LiveView and all three Tapbots apps.

Scoreboard

Here are the top five apps from the 60 Home screens featured on First & 20. The colors have also been tallied up.

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