My iPhone Home Screen

Lat­est iPhone Home­screen, orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by J T. Ram­say.

What a mess!

I start­ed fol­low­ing First & 20 dur­ing our trip to Out­er Banks this year. Their iPhone home screen series has been very inter­est­ing. As I’ve men­tioned before, my iPhone became some­thing of a life­line while I was in the hos­pi­tal with Helen when Char­lie was born. I scoured the app store in a sleep-deprived haze for any­thing to keep me alert and occu­pied dur­ing those 3 a.m. feed­ings. Let me put it to you straight: there are a ton of apps and most of them are garbage. First & 20’s series then seemed like the answer to my prayers. I will final­ly com­plete­ly opti­mize my iPhone home screen! How pos­i­tive­ly geeky!

Since Char­lie was born I’ve down­loaded and delet­ed more apps than I can remem­ber. I scru­ti­nize my choic­es and often won­der why I both­ered down­load­ing an app I’ve used maybe twice. (I’m look­ing at you, Open Table. Thanks for those time­ly Butch­er & Singer reser­va­tions, though!) Turns out I’m not so dif­fer­ent from even the most sophis­ti­cat­ed iPhone users. Just read­ing Mar­co Armen­t’s post (and sub­se­quent fol­low-up) shows that I’m not the only one bing­ing and purg­ing apps.

If I’m com­plete­ly hon­est, I use the iPhone the way most peo­ple have used their cell­phones for years: to take quick, often grainy pic­tures of what­ev­er they’re doing that sec­ond. In fact, the things I use most fre­quent­ly are the clock and weath­er apps. My iPhone dou­bles as my alarm clock and then I check the weath­er before I go run­ning. Fan­cy, right? I use two main social net­work­ing apps: Tweet­ie and Face­book. I check scores on ESPN Score­cen­ter. I upload pho­tos to Flickr, either via their app or Pix­elpipe if I want to put it on Face­book simultaneously.

The oth­er stuff? Bare­ly used van­i­ty apps that I down­loaded think­ing they’d be more use­ful than they are. Yelp only infre­quent­ly intro­duces me to a restau­rant I haven’t tried, and I should­n’t trust it as much as I do. Yahoo’s Fan­ta­sy Foot­ball app is use­less, but it gives me real-time scor­ing so I can weep while games are in progress. Foursquare? I for­get it’s there more often than not. I.TV and Word­Press are two apps that I’d use more if they tweaked a thing or two. As you can see, it’s a jun­gle out there.

What apps do you have on your home screen? Are there any you can’t live without?