Justin Williams

http://carpeaqua.com/

Justin Williams is the guy behind Second Gear. Maybe you use his apps: Today and Check Off.  You may have also heard of him from his various former projects like PocketTweets and FuckingNDA.com or as the organizer of Indie+Relief.  He also writes about Mac and iPhone development on Twitter or his personal site, carpeaqua.

I am a member of the “leave the bottom row clear” club. It is partially because I think it looks cleaner, but also because there are just not that many iPhone apps that I use and enjoy enough that I want them in front of me at all times. I have a habit of expunging apps from my phone and iTunes if they aren’t actually on the phone. Apps aren’t like baseball cards to me. If they aren’t in active use at least once a week, I give them the axe.

My Dock apps are used dozens of times a day. I swapped the Messages and Phone apps because I don’t enjoy talking on the phone and would much prefer people email, text or tweet me. Birdfeed is my preferred Twitter client by a mile. I appreciate what Buzz and Neven set out to accomplish with the app. I understand the appeal of Tweetie and also use it periodically because it already supports native retweets and lists, but Birdfeed will always have the best mix of simplicity and functionality in user interface.

Though Pastebot has been around for a few months now, I only recently downloaded it. In such a short time it has changed the way I use my phone. Coupled with the companion Mac app I can now easily transfer text and images back and forth from my phone to the Mac. For instance, to capture my screen for this page I snapped it, copied it to my iPhone’s clipboard, launched Pastebot and then automatically had it paste into a new Acorn image on my Mac. That’s ridiculously cool.

My iPhone is also my iPod and as a health nut, I am always jumping through songs while running outside or at the gym.

The top row is for the most part Apple-centric. The phone app is there just because. The Calendar app is there because I am frequently checking my schedule. I’d actually like to make Today for the iPhone someday, but short of Apple opening up the framework like they did on the Mac, it’s not likely to happen. I use Maps quite a bit when I just want to get a number for a local restaurant to make a reservation. Camera Genius is my replacement for the main camera app. I like it because of the anti-shake support and the ability to put a grid on the screen. My only wish is that I could set Camera Genius to be my home button double-tap action rather than the standard camera app. Maybe iPhone OS 4.0.

I am not much of a MobileMail user in terms of reading messages on the go, but I keep it on the homescreen because I constantly email myself reminders of stuff to check out or remember to do when I get back home. If I have an idea for a project that I don’t want to forget, I email it to myself so that it’s in my inbox for processing sometime later.

In a similar respect I use WriteRoom to flesh out long-term project ideas among other things. It’s also great for using for notes during a presentation. I am not a fan of using slides when presenting, so I tend to just scribble a few notes into WriteRoom and reference them during my talk. I also keep family recipes in there so I can have access to them when I’m in the kitchen. I like WriteRoom because it syncs with their Web-based notes services so that I don’t have just a single copy of the data stored on my phone.

Reeder is my mobile RSS reader, though I don’t really enjoy reading feeds on my phone. My workflow usually consists of finding an article I want to read and sending it into Instapaper. I then pound through my Instapaper queue when I have some free time.

TWC Max, is the Weather Channel’s paid app. It is also the worst named app on my home screen, which constantly makes me want to remove it. I stick with it, however because I haven’t found a better weather app. I far prefer their radar to the government provided ones. I’ve long wanted to create my own weather app for the phone.
I’m a Foursquare junkie, though being in the middle of Indiana makes it somewhat less fun than when I visit San Francisco. Foursquare’s biggest problem since opening up worldwide is that people in flyover states do not understand how to use it properly, so what is a nice organized list of businesses in larger cities is utter chaos around here. I long for superuser privileges to clean up the wild midwest.

Safari is on the homescreen because it is the best selling point of the iPhone to anyone who doesn’t get it. I don’t understand how anyone can still use a Blackberry with its lame browser.

An IMDb app was one of the first things I sought out when App Store opened, and only recently did they release it. I am a movie and television junkie after hours, so I am constantly referencing IMDb to try and pinpoint what movie an actor was in or check the episode listings for my favorite TV shows. The app isn’t perfect, but it’s fairly close.

To go along with my television and movie obsession, I am also into sports. As a graduate of a Purdue university (Boiler Up!), I find ScoreCenter to be the best way to keep up with basketball and football scores. The swipe motion physics are a bit wonky in the application, but it nails the user experience otherwise.