iPhone iPhone Home Screen
Jonathan Stark

Jonathan Stark

http://jonathanstark.com/

Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web.

He has written two books on web application programming, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and has been quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends.

Jonathan began his programming career more than 20 years ago on a Tandy TRS-80 and still thinks Zork was a sweet game.

I do a lot of mobile development, so I literally have a box full of phones on my desk. I never know which I’ll be using or when I’ll need to reset them all to factory settings, so I don’t waste much time tweaking my home screens.

That said, I did recently organize the first screen on my main phone. My approach was to remove all the icons and move apps back as I used them. Once the screen was full, I organized them by color.

By far, my most used app is Safari. In fact, 5 of the 20 icons on my home screen are links to web apps. Since I’m always shifting between phones, laptops, desktops, etc… it’s unrealistic for me to try to keep my data in sync across all devices. Three cheers for the cloud, baby!

My most used web app is Gmail. As far as I’m concerned, it blows away the built-in Mail app and sets a standard that web apps developers should aspire to.

Next most heavily used apps are Google Calendar, Remember The Milk, and Kilo. Not much to say about these - they are excellent, useful, and I launch each at least 10 times a day.

I like Foursquare and Gowalla but I don’t use them all that much. I originally installed them because I’m speaking at Where 2.0, and I figured I better get familiar with the poster children of the space :) Still deciding whether either will graduate from fun to useful.

I’m on Twitter a lot (shocker) and Tweetie 2 is my client of choice (again, shocker).

iT3 is a drop dead simple photo sharing web app that I built and use frequently. Think Flickr without a login.

Settings is in the tray because I’m constantly turning WiFi and the Safari Debug console on and off. So annoying.

I rarely listen to music, but the iPod app gets used regularly because I’m addicted to podcasts. Boagworld, TWiG, Skeptoid, and various NPR shows are in heavy rotation.

Facebook, Photos, Camera, and iVideoCamera are all present because we just had a baby and I’m incessantly recording the most minor facial expression and uploading for the g’rents.

I recently set up Google Voice to hijack my native voicemail and email the transcripts to me. Since then, I have hardly launched the Phone app. I’m just starting to dork around with the Google Voice web app so I don’t really have an opinion on that yet.

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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