Patrick Haney

http://patrickhaney.com

Patrick Haney is not a sausage. He does however enjoy design, typography and talking about himself in the third person. When he’s not working as a web designer, he sometimes writes about stuff on his website and can be found at many conferences, often wearing a KERN sweatshirt.

While I’m constantly tweaking my iPhone screens (yes, all 5 of them), the home screen doesn’t change all that much. I’ve kept a fairly similar look to the initial view for the longest time, including some of the original default app arrangements and the 2 empty app spaces, which I feel give me a little “whitespace” (or is it “blackspace?”) in an otherwise cluttered device.

My iPhone’s dock is fairly straightforward. I’m not a fan of checking email on the go, as I’d rather untether myself from it when I’m not near a computer, so it moved off the dock a long time ago. Messages, one of my most used apps, sits on the left under Tweetie 2 for obvious reasons. While I don’t actually use my iPhone as a phone most of the time, I hesitate to move that functionality off of the dock. Safari and the iPod app round out the 4 apps here, though recently I’ve moved the Phone app to the far right in order to break up the 2 green icons that sometimes throw me when I’m in a hurry.

In the upper left corner is my ode to Garrett Murray. I love checking stats, and Ego is perfect for aggregating them all in one place (plus the icon is gorgeous and isn’t it ironic to have the first app on your iPhone named “Ego?”). As mentioned before, Mail isn’t a priority on my phone, but I do use it every few days. Photos and Camera remain in their usual spot, which make them easy to find, though I typically go to the Camera app much more than the Photos.

Other apps in their original default positions (before the Compass and Voice Memos apps were around) include Maps (which I use constantly), Weather (an app I rarely use and would be much more useful if its icon displayed the current weather, similar to how the Calendar icon shows the current date), Settings (which I find handy here for the ability to switch on/off wifi and Airplane Mode), and the App Store (I’m always checking for app updates or new things I can spend money on). The Clock app, which I still use for my daily morning alarm(s), and the Notes app, which is great for jotting down quick ideas, are in slightly different spots. And while I don’t use the Calendar app all that often, I like seeing today’s date on the home screen.

So how about the other 3 apps? For a long time I had both Gowalla and Foursquare on my home screen and would use both to “check in” to a location, but grew tired of the effort involved. I’ve moved Foursquare off to another screen and stick with Gowalla exclusively due to its attractive design and fun gameplay. Classics is an app I don’t use all that often, but the icon is one of my favorites and it’s a nice reminder that I have books I can read while I’m on the go. Last, but certainly not least, is Tweetie 2.

While I could go on and on about Tweetie 2 and how it doesn’t really live up to the hype of its release, I will say that it’s the best option I’ve found for a Twitter client on the iPhone. While its UI is fairly unimaginative and can seem overly complex, I spend a lot of time running it on my iPhone. The addition of push notifications for direct messages and @ replies would make me forget any issues I ever had with it though.

Lastly, this screenshot is a bit of a farce. I always have unread mail messages due to the fact that I hardly ever check it on my iPhone and that I just don’t care. And by 5:20PM of any given day, I typically have less than 64% battery left. Maybe if I could just put the damn thing down once in a while…